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GERMAN CULTURE 
PAST AND PRESENT 



I 



GERMAN CULTURE 

PAST AND PRESENT 



BY 

ERNEST BELFORT BAX 

AUTHOR OF "JEAN PAUL MARAT," "THE RELIGION OF SOCIALISM,' 
" THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM," "THE ROOTS OF REALITY, " ETC., ETC. 



NEW YORK 

McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY 

1915 



^to 



4- 



3/7/ 



\All rights reseived] 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

INTRODUCTORY : — SrrUATION IN THE SIXTEENTH 

CENTURY ..... 7 

I. THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT . . . 65 

II. POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE TIME - . 85 

HI. THE FOLKLORE OF REFORMATION GERMANY . 99 

IV. THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN TOWN . II4 

V. COUNTRY AND TOWN AT THE END OF THE 

MIDDLE AGES . . . . .122 

VL THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD . .154 

VII. GENERAL SIGNS OF RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL 

REVOLT . . . . .174 

VIII. THE GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS AND THE 

ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT . . . 183 

^7«C. POST-MEDIiEVAL GERMANY . . .229 

~-X. MODERN GERMAN CULTURE . . -263 V' 

5 



PREFACE 

The following pages aim at giving a general view of the 
social and intellectual life of Germany from the end oi 
the mediaeval period to modern times. In the earlier por- 
tion of the book, the first half of the sixteenth century 
in Germany is dealt with at much greater length and in 
greater detail than the later period, a sketch of which forms 
the subject of the last two chapters. The reason for this 
is to be found in the fact that while the roots of the later 
German character and culture are to be sought for in the 
life of this period, it is comparatively little known to the 
average educated English reader. In the early fifteenth 
century, during the Reformation era, German life and culture 
in its widest sense began to consolidate them.selves, and at 
the same time to take on an originality which differentiated i 
them from the general life and culture of Western Europe as 
it was during the Middle Ages. 

To those who would fully appreciate the later developments, * 
therefore, it is essential thoroughly to understand the details 
of the social and intellectual history of the time in question. 
For the later period there are many more works of a generally 
popular character available for the student and general reader. 
The chief aim of the sketch given in Chapters IX and X 
is to bring into sharp relief those events which, in the Author's 
view, represent more or less crucial stages in the development 
of modern Germany. 

For the earlier portion of the present volume an older 
work of the Author's, now out of print, entitled German 
Society at the Close of the Middle Ages^ has been largely 
drawn upon. Reference, as will be seen, has also been 
made in the course of the present work to two other writings 
from the same pen which are still to be had for those desirous 
of fuller information on their respective subjects, viz. The 
Peasants^ War and The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists 
(Messrs. George Allen & Unwin). 



German Culture Past and 
Present 

INTRODUCTORY 

The close of the fifteenth century had left the 
whole structure of mediaeval Europe to all 
appearance intact. Statesmen and writers like 
Philip de Commines had apparently as little 
suspicion that the state of things they saw 
around them, in which they had grown up 
and of which they were representatives, was 
ever destined to pass away, as others in their 
turn have since had. Society was organized 
on the feudal hierarchy of status. In the first 
place, a noble class, spiritual and temporal, 
was opposed to a peasantry either wholly servile 
or but nominally free. In addition to this 
opposition of noble and peasant there was that 
of the township, which, in its corporate 
capacity, stood in the relation of lord to the 
surrounding peasantry. 

The township in Germany was of two 



8 



GERMAN CULTURE 



kinds— first of all, there was the township 
that was " free of the Empire/' that is, that 
held nominally from the Emperor himself 
(Reichstadt)y and secondly, there was the 
township that was under the domination of an 
intermediate lord. The economic basis of the 
whole was still land ; the status of a man or 
of a corporation was determined by the mode in 
which they held their land. '* No land without 
a lord " was the principle of mediseval polity ; 
just as *' money has no master '' is the basis 
of the modem world with its self-made men. 
Every distinction of rank in the feudal system 
was still denoted for the most part by a special 
costume. It was a world of knights in armour, 
of ecclesiastics in vestments and stoles, of 
lawyers in robes, of princes in silk and velvet 
and cloth of gold, and of peasants in laced 
shoe, brown cloak, and cloth hat. 

But although the whole feudal organization 
was outwardly intact, the thinker who was 
watching the signs of the times would not have 
been long in arriving at the conclusion that 
feudalism was '' played out,'' that the whole 
fabric of mediaeval civilization was becoming 
dry and withered, and had either already begun 
to disintegrate or was on the eve of doing so. 
Causes of change had within the past half- 
century been working underneath the surface 
of social life, and were rapidly undermining the 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

whole structure. The growing use of firearms 
in war ; the rapid multiplication of printed 
books ; the spread of the new learning after 
the taking of Constantinople in 1453, and the 
subsequent dififusion of Greek teachers through- 
out Europe ; the surely and steadily increasing 
communication with the new world, and the 
consequent increase of the precious metals ; 
and, last but not least, Vasco da Gama's dis- 
covery of the new trade route from the East 
by way of the Cape— all these were indica- 
tions of the fact that the death-knell of the* 
old order of things had struck. 

Notwithstanding the apparent outward in- 
tegrity of the system based on land tenures, 
land was ceasing to be the only form of 
productive wealth. Hence it was losing the 
exclusive importance attaching to it in the 
earlier period of the Middle Ages. The first 
form of modern capitalism had already arisen. 
Large aggregations of capital in the hands of 
trading companies were becoming common. 
The Roman law was establishing itself in the 
place of the old customary tribal law which 
had hitherto prevailed in the manorial courts, 
serving in some sort as a bulwark against 
the caprice of the territorial lord ; and this 
change facilitated the development of the 
bourgeois principle of private, as opposed to 
communal, property. In intellectual matters, 



lo GERMAN CULTURE 

though theology still maintained its supremacy 
as the chief subject of human interest, other 
interests were rapidly growing up alongside 
of it, the most prominent being the study of 
classical literature. 

Besides these things, there was the dawning 
interest in nature, which took on, as a matter 
of course, a magical form in accordance with 
traditional and contemporary modes of thought . 
In fact, like the flicker of a dying candle in 
its socket, the Middle Ages seemed at the 
beginning of the sixteenth century to exhibit 
all their own salient characteristics in an 
exaggerated and distorted form. The old feudal 
relations had degenerated into a blood-sucking 
oppression ; the old rough brutality, into ex- 
cogitated and elaborated cruelty (aptly illus- 
trated in the collection of ingenious instruments 
preserved in the Torture-tower at Niirnberg) ; 
the old crude superstition, into a systematized 
magical theory of natural causes and effects ; 
the old love of pageantry, into a lavish 
luxury and magnificence of which we have in 
the *' field of the cloth of gold " the stock his- 
torical example ; the old chivalry, into the 
mercenary bravery of the soldier, whose trade 
it was to fight, and who recognized only one 
virtue— to wit, animal courage. Again, all these 
exaggerated characteristics were mixed with 
new elements, which distorted them further. 



INTRODUCTORY ii 

and which foreshadowed a coming change, the 
ultimate issue of which would be their extinc- 
tion and that of the life of which they were 
the signs. ^^ 

The growing tendency towards centralization \ 
and the consequent suppression or curtailment 
of the local autonomies of the Middle Ages 
in the interests of some kind of national 
government, of which the political careers of 
Louis XI in France, of Edward IV in 
England, and of Ferdinand and Isabella in 
Spain were such conspicuous instances, did not 
fail to affect in a lesser degree that loosely 
connected political system of German States 
known as the Holy Roman Empire. Maxi- 
milian's first Reichstag in 1495 caused to be 
issued an Imperial edict suppressing the right 
of private warfare claimed and exercised by the 
whole noble class from the princes of the 
empire down to the meanest knight. In the 
same year the Imperial Chamber {Reichskam- 
mer) was established, and in i 501 the Imperial 
Aulic Council. Maximilian also organized a 
standing army of mercenary troops, called 
Landesknechte, Shortly afterwards Germany 
was divided into Imperial districts called circles 
{Kreise), ultimately ten in number, all of which 
were under an imperial government {Reichs- 
regiment), which had at its disposal a 
military force for the punishment of dis- 



12 GERMAN CULTURE 

turbers of the peace. But the public opinion 
of the age, conjoined with the particular 
circumstances, political and economic, of 
Central Europe, robbed the enactment in a 
great measure of its immediate effect. High- 
way plundering and even private war were still 
going on, to a considerable extent, far into 
the sixteenth century. Charles V pursued the 
same line of policy as his predecessor ; but 
it was not until after the suppression of the 
lower nobility in 1523, and finally of the 
peasants in 1526, that any material change 
took place ; and then the centralization, such as 
it was, was in favour of the princes, rather 
than of the Imperial power, which, after 
Charles V's time, grew weaker and weaker. 
The speciality about the history of Germany 
is, that it has not known [till our own day 
centralization on a national or racial scale like 
England or France. 

At the opening of the sixteenth century 
public opinion not merely sanctioned open 
plunder by the wearer of spurs and by the 
possessor of a stronghold, but regarded it as 
his special prerogative, the exercise of which 
was honourable rather than disgraceful. The 
cities certainly resented their burghers being 
waylaid and robbed, and hanged the knights 
wherever they could ; and something like a 
perpetual feud always existed between the 



INTRODUCTORY 13 

wealthier cities and the knights who infested 
the trade routes leading to and from them. 
Still, these belligerent relations were taken as 
a matter of course ; and no disgrace, in the 
modern sense, attached to the occupation of 
highway robbery. 

In consequence of the impoverishment of 
the knights at this period, owing to causes 
with which we shall deal later, the trade or 
profession had recently received an accession 
of vigour, and at the same time was carried 
on more brutally and mercilessly than ever 
before. We will give some instances of the 
sort of occurrence which was by no means 
unusual. In the immediate neighbourhood of 
Niirnberg, which was bien entenda one of the 
chief seats of the Imperial power, a robber- 
knight leader, named Hans Thomas von 
Absberg, was a standing menace. It was the 
custom of this ruffian, who had a large follow- 
ing, to plunder even the poorest who came 
from the city, and, not content with this, to 
mutilate his victims . In June 1522 he fell 
upon a wretched craftsman, and with his own 
sword hacked off the poor fellow's right hand, 
notwithstanding that the man begged him upon 
his knees to take the left, and not destroy his 
means of earning his livelihood. The follow- 
ing August he, with his band, attacked a Niirn- 
berg tanner, whose hand was similarly treated, 



14 GERMAN CULTURE 

one of his associates remarking that he was 
glad to set to work again, as it was *' a long 
time since they had done any business in 
hands." On the same occasion a cutler was 
dealt with after a similar fashion. The hands 
in these cases were collected and sent to the 
Biirgermeister of Niirnberg, with some such 
phrase as that the sender (Hans Thomas) 
would treat all so who came from the city. 
The princes themselves, when it suited their 
purpose, did not hesitate to offer an asylum to 
these knightly robbers. With Absberg were 
associated Georg von Giech and Hans Georg 
von Aufsess. Among other notable robber- 
knights of the time may be mentioned the 
Lord of Brandenstein and the Lord of 
Rosenberg. As illustrating the strictly pro- 
fessional character of the pursuit, and the 
brutally callous nature of the society practising 
it, we may narrate that Margaretha von 
Brandenstein was accustomed, it is recorded, 
to give the advice to the choice guests round 
her board that when a merchant failed to keep 
his promise to them, they should never hesi- 
tate to cut off both his hands. Even Franz 
von Sickingen, known sometimes as the " last 
flower of German chivalry," boasted of having 
among the intimate associates of his enterprise 
for the rehabilitation of the knighthood many 
gentlemen who had been accustomed to '' let 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

their horses on the high road bite off the purses 
of wayfarers." So strong was the public 
opinion of the noble class as to the inviola- 
bility of the privilege of highway plunder that 
a monk, preaching one day in a cathedral and 
happening to attack it as unjustifiable, narrowly 
escaped death at the hands of some knights 
present amongst his congregation, who asserted 
that he had insulted the prerogatives of their 
order. Whenever this form of knight-errantry 
was criticized, there were never wanting 
scholarly pens to defend it as a legitimate 
means of aristocratic livelihood ; since a knight 
must live in suitable style, and this was often 
his only resource for obtaining the means 
thereto . 

The jfree cities, which were subject only to 
Imperial jurisdiction, were practically inde- 
pendent republics. Their organization was a 
microcosm of that of the entire empire. At 
the apex of the municipal society was the Biir- 
germeister and the so-called '* Honorability " 
{Ehrbarkeit), which consisted of the patrician 
clans or gentes (in most cases), those families 
which were supposed to be descended from the 
original chartered freemen of the town, the 
old Mark -brethren. They comprised generally 
the richest families, and had monopolized the 
entire government of the city, together with 
the right to administer its various sources of 



i6 GERMAN CULTURE 

income and to consume its revenue at their 
pleasure. By the time, however, of which 
we are writing, the trade -guilds had also 
attained to a separate power of their own, 
and were in some cases ousting the burgher- 
aristocracy, though they were very generally 
susceptible of being manipulated by the 
members of the patrician class, who, as a rule, 
could alone sit in the Council {Rath). The 
latter body stood, in fact, as regards the town, 
much in the relation of the feudal lord to his 
manor. Strong in their wealth and in their 
aristocratic privileges, the patricians lorded it 
alike over the townspeople and over the neigh- 
bouring peasantry, who were subject to the 
municipality. They forestalled and regrated 
with impunity. They assumed the chief rights 
in the municipal lands, in many cases imposed 
duties at their own caprice, and turned guild 
privileges and rights of citizenship into a source 
of profit for themselves. Their bailiffs in the 
country districts forming part of their territory 
were often more voracious in their treatment of 
the peasants than even the nobles themselves. 
The accounts of income and expenditure were 
kept in the loosest manner, and embezzlement 
clumsily concealed was the rule rather than 
the exception. 

The opposition of the non -privileged citizens, 
usually led by the wealthier guildsmen not 



INTRODUCTORY 17 

belonging to the aristocratic class, operated 
through the guilds and through the open 
assembly of the citizens. It had already 
frequently succeeded in establishing a repre- 
sentation of the general body of the guildsmen 
in a so-called Great Council {Grosser Rath)^ 
and in addition, as already said, in ousting the 
** honorables " from some; of the public func- 
tions. Altogether the patrician party, though V 
still powerful enough, was at the opening of 
the sixteenth century already on the decline, the 
wealthy and unprivileged opposition beginning 
in its turn to constitute itself into a quasi - 
aristocratic body as against the mass of the 
poorer citizens and those outside the pale of 
municipal rights. The latter class was now 
becoming an important and turbulent factor in 
the life of the larger cities. The craft -guilds, 
consisting of the body of non-patrician citizens, 
were naturally in general dominated by their 

most wealthy section. .; 

We may here observe that the development 
of the mediaeval township from its earliest 
beginnings up to the period of its decay in the 
sixteenth century was almost uniformly as 
follows : I At first the township, or rather what 
later became the township, was represented 

' We are here, of course, dealing more especially with 
Germany ; but substantially the same course was followed in 
the development of municipalities in other parts of Europe. 

2 



i8 GERMAN CULTURE 

entirely by the circle of gentes or group- 
families originally settled within the mark or 
district on which the town subsequently stood. 
These constituted the original aristocracy from 
which the tradition of the Ehrbarkeit dated. 
In those towns founded by the Romans, such 
as Trier, Aachen, and others, the case was 
of course a little different. There the origin 
of the Ehrbarkeit may possibly be sought for 
in the leading families of the Roman provincials 
who were in occupation of the tow^n at the 
coming of the barbarians in the fifth century. 
Round the original nucleus there gradually 
accreted from the earliest period of the Middle 
Ages the freed men of the surrounding dis- 
tricts, fugitive serfs, and others who sought 
that protection and means of livelihood in a 
community under the immediate domination of 
a powerful lord, which they could not other- 
wise obtain when their native village-com- 
munity had perchance been raided by some 
marauding noble and his retainers. Circum- 
stances, amongst others the fact that the com- 
munity to which they attached themselves had 
already adopted commerce and thus become 
a guild of merchants, led to the differentiation 
of industrial functions amongst the new-comers, 
and thus to the estabhshment of craft -guilds. 
Another origin of the townsfolk, which 
must not be overlooked, is to be found in the 



I 



I 



INTRODUCTORY 19 

attendants on the palace-fortress of some 
great overlord. In the early Middle Ages all 
such magnates kept up an extensive estab- 
lishment, the greater ecclesiastical lords no less 
than the secular often having several castles. 
In Germany this origin of the township was 
furthered by Charles the Great, who estab- 
lished schools and other civil institutions, with a 
magistrate at their head, round many of the 
palace -castles that he founded. '' A new 
epoch," says Von Maurer, '' begins with the 
villa-foundations of Charles the Great and his 
ordinances respecting them, for that his cele- 
brated capitularies in this connection were 
intended for his newly established villas is self- 
evident. In that proceeding he obviously had 
the Roman villa in his mind, and on the model 
of this he rather further developed the pre- 
viously existing court and villa constitution 
than completely reorganized it. Hence one 
finds even in his new creations the old founda- 
tion again, albeit on a far more extended plan, 
the economical side of such villa-colonies 
being especially more completely and effec- 
tively ordered." ^ The expression '* Palatine," 
as applied to certain districts, bears testimony 
to the fact here referred to. As above said, 
the development of the township was every- 
where on the same lines. The aim of the 

^ Einkitung^ pp. 255, 256. 



20 GERMAN CULTURE 

civic community was always to remove as far 
as possible the power which controlled them. 
Their worst condition was when they were 
immediately overshadowed by a territorial 
magnate. When their immediate lord was a 
prince, the area of whose feudal jurisdiction 
was more extensive, his rule was less oppres- 
sively felt, and their condition was therefore 
considerably improved. It was only, however, 
when cities were ** free of the empire " 
{Reichsfrei) that they attained the ideal of 
mediaeval civic freedom. 
/ It follows naturally from the conditions 
described that there was, in the first place, a 
conflict between the primitive inhabitants as 
embodied in their corporate society and the 
territorial lord, whoever he might be. No 
sooner had the township acquired a charter 
of freedom or certain immunities than a new 
antagonism showed itself between the ancient 
corporation of the city and the trade -guilds, 
these representing the later accretions. The 
territorial lord (if any) now sided, usually 
though not always, with the patrician party. 
But the guilds, nevertheless, succeeded in ulti- 
mately wresting many of the leading public 
offices from the exclusive possession of the 
patrician families. Meanwhile the leading men 
of the guilds had become homtnes arrives. 
They had acquired wealth, and influence 



INTRODUCTORY 21 

which was in many cases hereditary in their 
family, and by the beginning of the sixteenth j 
century they were confronted with the more ' 
or less veiled and more or less open opposition 
of the smaller guildsmen and of the newest \ 
comers into the city, the shiftless proletariat \ 
of serfs and free peasants, whom economic 
pressure was fast driving within the walls, 
owing to the changed conditions of the times^^ / 

The peasant of the period was of three \ 
kinds: the leibeigener or serf, who was little - 
better than a slave, who cultivated his lord's 
domain, upon whom unlimited burdens might 
be fixed, and who was in all respects amen- 
able to the will of his lord ; the horiger or 
villein, whose services were limited alike in 
kind and amount ; and the freier or free 
peasant, who merely paid what was virtually a 
quit -rent in kind or in money for being 
allowed to retain his holding or status in the 
rural community under the protection of the 
manorial lord. The last was practically the 
counterpart of the mediaeval English copy- 
holder. The Germans had undergone essen- 
tially the same transformations in social 
organization as the other populations of / 
Europe. 

The barbarian nations at the time of their 
great migration in the fifth century were 
organized on a tribal and village basis. The 



22 GERMAN CULTURE 

head man was simply primus inter pares. 
In the course of their wanderings the success- 
ful mihtary leader acquired powers and 
assumed a position that was unknown to the 
previous times, when war, such as it was, was 
merely inter-tribal and inter-clannish, and did 
not involve the movements of peoples and 
federations of tribes, and when, in conse- 
quence, the need of permanent military leaders 
or for the semblance of a military hierarchy 
had not arisen. The military leader now 
placed himself at the head of the older social 
organization, and associated with his imme- 
diate followers on terms approaching equality. 
A well-known illustration of this is the inci- 
dent of the vase taken from the Cathedral of 
Rheims, and of Chlodowig's efforts to rescue 
it from his independent comrade-in-arms. 

The process of the development of the 
feudal polity of the Middle Ages is, of course, 
a very complicated one, owing to the various 
strands that go to compose it. In addition 
to the German tribes themselves, who moved 
en masse, carrying with them their tribal and 
village organization, under the overlordship 
of the various military leaders, were the 
indigenous inhabitants amongst whom they 
settled. The latter in the country districts, 
even in many of the territories within the 
Roman Empire, still largely retained the primi- 



INTRODUCTORY 23 

tive communal organization. The new-comers, 
therefore, found in the rural communities a 
social system already in existence into which 
they naturally fitted, but as an aristocratic 
body over against the conquered inhabitants. 
The latter, though not all reduced to a servile 
condition, nevertheless held their land from the 
conquering body under conditions which con- 
stituted them an order of freemen inferior to 
the new-comers. 

To put the matter briefly, the military 
leaders developed into barons and princes, and 
in some cases the nominal centralization cul- 
minated, as in France and England, in the 
kingly office ; while, in Germany and Italy, 
it took the form of the revived Imperial office, 
the spiritual overlord of the whole of 
Christendom being the Pope, who had his 
vassals in the prince -prelates and subordinate 
ecclesiastical holders. In addition to the 
princes sprung originally from the military 
leaders of the migratory nations, there were 
their free followers, who developed ultimately 
into the knighthood or inferior nobility ; the 
inhabitants of the conquered districts forming 
a distinct class of inferior freemen or of serfs. 
But the essentially personal relation with which 
the whole process started soon degenerated 
into one based on property. The most primi- 
tive form of property — land — was at the outset 



24 GERMAN CULTURE 

what was termed allodial, at least among the 
conquering race, from every social group 
having the possession, under the trusteeship 
of his head man, of the Land on which it 
settled. Now, owing to the necessities of the 
time, owing to the need of protection, to vio- 
lence, and to religious motives, it passed into 
the hands of the overlord, temporal or 
spiritual, as his possession ; and the inhabi- 
tants, even in the case of populations which 
had not been actually conquered, became his 
vassals, villeins, or serfs, as the case might 
be. The process by means of which this was 
accomplished was more or less gradual ; in- 
deed, the entire extinction of communal rights, 
whereby the notion of private ownership is 
fully realized, was not universally effected even 
in the West of Europe till within a measur- 
able distance of our own time.^ 

From the foregoing it will be understood 
that the oppression of the peasant, under the 
feudalism of the Middle Ages, and especi- 
ally of the later Middle Ages, was viewed by 
him as an infringement of his rights. During 
the period of time constituting mediaeval 
history, the peasant, though he often slum- 

^ Cf. Von Maurer's Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark- 
Verfassung ; Gomme's Village Communities ; Laveleye, La 
Propriety Primitive ; Stubbs's Constitutional History^ ; also 
Maine's works. 



INTRODUCTORY 25 

bered, yet often started up to a sudden con- 
sciousness of his position. The memory of 
primitive communism was never quite extin- 
guished, and the continual peasant -revolts of 
the Middle Ages, though immediately occa- 
sioned, probably, by some fresh invasion, by 
which it was sought to tear from the "common 
man" yet another shred of his surviving 
rights, always had in the background the ideal, 
vague though it may have been, of his ancient 
freedom. Such, undoubtedly, was the meaning 
of the Jacquerie in France, with its wild and 
apparently senseless vengeance ; of the Wat 
Tyler revolt in England, with its systematic 
attempt to envisage the vague tradition of the 
primitive village community in the legends of 
the current ecclesiastical creed ; of the 
numerous revolts in Flanders and North Ger- 
many ; to a large extent of the Hussite move- 
ment in Bohemia, under Ziska ; of the 
rebellion led by George Doza in Hungary ; 
and, as we shall see in the body of the present 
work, of the social movements of Reforma- 
tion Germany, in which, with the partial 
exception of Ket's rebellion in England a few 
years later, we may consider them as virtually 
coming to an end. 

For the movements in question were dis- 
tinctly the last of their kind. The civil wars 
of religion in France, and the great rebellion 



26 GERMAN CULTURE 

in England against Charles I, which also 
assumed a religious colouring, open a new 
era in popular revolts. In the latter, par- 
ticularly, we have clearly before us the attempt 
of the new middle class of town and country, 
the independent citizen, and the now inde- 
pendent yeoman, to assert supremacy over the 
old feudal estates or orders . The new conditions 
had swept away the special revolutionary tra- 
dition of the mediaeval period, whose golden 
age lay in the past with its communal -holding 
and free men with equal rights on the basis 
of the village organization — rights which with 
every century the peasant felt more and more 
slipping away from him. The place of this 
tradition was now taken by an ideal of indi- 
vidual freedom, apart from any social bond, 
and on a basis merely political, the way for 
which had been prepared by that very con- 
ception of individual proprietorship on the part 
of the landlord, against which the older revo- 
lutionary sentiment had protested. A most 
powerful instrument in accommodating men's 
minds to this change of view, in other words, 
to the estabhshment of the new individualistic 
principle, was the Roman or Civil law, which, 
at the period dealt with in the present book, 
had become the basis whereon disputed points 
were settled in the Imperial Courts. In this 
respect also, though to a lesser extent, may 



INTRODUCTORY 27 

be mentioned the Canon or Ecclesiastical law 
— consisting of papal decretals on various 
points which were founded partially on the 
Roman or Civil law — a juridical system which 
also fully and indeed almost exclusively recog- 
nized the individual holding of property as the 
basis of civil society (albeit not without a 
recognition of social duties on the part of the 
owner ) . 

Learning was now beginning to differen- 
tiate itself from the ecclesiastical profession, 
and to become a definite vocation in its 
various branches. Crowds of students flocked 
to the seats of learning, and, as travelling 
scholars, earned a precarious living by begging 
or *' professing '' medicine, assisting the 
illiterate for a small fee, or working wonders, 
such as casting horoscopes, or performing 
thaumaturgic tricks. The professors of law 
were now the most influential members of the 
Imperial Council and of the various Imperial 
Courts. In Central Europe, as elsewhere, 
notably in France, the civil lawyers were 
always on the side of the centralizing power, 
alike against the local jurisdictions and against 
the peasantry. 

The effects of the conquest of Constanti- 
nople in 1453, and the consequent dispersion 
of the accumulated Greek learning of the 
Byzantine Empire, had, by the end of the 



28 GERMAN CULTURE 

fifteenth century, begun to show themselves in 
a notable modification of European culture. 
The circle of the seven sciences, the Quadri- 
vium, and the Trivium, in other words, the 
mediaeval system of learning, began to be anti- 
quated. Scholastic philosophy, that is to say, 
the controversy of the Scotists and the 
Thomists, was now growing out of date. Plato 
was extolled at the expense of Aristotle. 
Greek, and even Hebrew, was eagerly sought 
after. Latin itself was assuming another 
aspect ; the Renaissance Latin is classical 
Latin, whilst Mediaeval Latin is dog-Latin. 
The physical universe now began to be in- 
quired into with a perfectly fresh interest, but 
the inquiries were still conducted under the 
aegis of the old habits of thought. The uni- 
verse was still a system of mysterious affinities 
and magical powers to the investigator of the 
Renaissance period, as it had been before. 
There was this difference, however : it was 
now attempted to systematize the magical 
theory of the universe. \^Tiile the common 
man held a store of traditional magical beliefs 
respecting the natural world, the learned man 
deduced these beliefs from the Neo-Platonists, 
from the Kabbala, from Hermes Trismegistos, 
and from a variety of other sources, and 
attempted to arrange this somewhat hetero- 
geneous mass of erudite lore into a system of 
organized thought. 



INTRODUCTORY 29 

The Humanistic movement, so called, the 
movement, that is, of revived classical scholar- 
ship, had already begun in Germany before 
what may be termed the starm and drang 
of the Renaissance proper. Foremost among 
the exponents of this older Humanism, which 
dates from the middle of the fifteenth century, 
were Nicholas of Cusa and his disciples, 
Rudolph Agricola, Alexander Hegius, and 
Jacob Wimpheling. But the new Humanism 
and the new Renaissance movement generally 
throughout Northern Europe centred chiefly 
in two personalities, Johannes Reuchlin and 
Desiderius Erasmus. Reuchlin was the 
founder of the new Hebrew learning, which 
up till then had been exclusively confined to 
the synagogue. It was he who unlocked the 
mysteries of the Kabbala to the Gentile world. 
But though it is for his introduction of Hebrew 
study that Reuchlin is best known to posterity, 
yet his services in the diffusion and populari- 
zation of classical culture were enormous. The 
dispute of Reuchlin with the ecclesiastical 
authorities at Cologne excited literary Germany 
from end to end. It was the first general 
skirmish of the new and the old spirit in 
Central and Northern Europe. 

But the man who was destined to be- 
come the personification of the Humanist 
movement, as the new learning was called^ 



30 GERMAN CULTURE 

was Erasmus. The illegitimate son of 
the daughter of a Rotterdam burgher, he 
early became famous on account of his 
erudition, in spite of the adverse circum- 
stances of his youth. Like all the scholars 
of his time, he passed rapidly from one ' 
country to another, settling finally in Basel, j 
then at the height of its reputation as a { 
literary and typographical centre. The whole I 
intellectual movement of the time centres round 
Erasmus, as is particularly noticeable in the 
career of Ulrich von Hutten, dealt with in 
the course of this history. As instances of 
the classicism of the period, we may note the 
uniform change of the patronymic into the 
classical equivalent, or some classicism sup- 
posed to be the equivalent. Thus the name 
Erasmus itself was a classicism of his father's 
name Gerhard, the German name Muth 
became Mutianus, Trittheim became Trithe- 
mius, Schwarzerd became Melanchthon, and 
so on. 

We have spoken of the other side of the 
intellectual movement of the period. This 
other side showed itself in mystical attempts 
at reducing nature to law in the light of the 
traditional problems which had been set, to 
wit, those of alchemy and astrology : the dis- 
covery of the philosopher's stone, of the trans- 
mutation of metals, of the elixir of life, and 



INTRODUCTORY 3^ 

of the correspondences between the planets and 
terrestrial bodies. Among the most promi- 
nent exponents of these investigations may be 
mentioned Philippus von Hohenheim or 
Paracelsus, and Cornelius Agrippa of Nette- 
sheim, in Germany, Nostrodamus in France, 
and Cardanus in Italy. These men represent 
a tendency which was pursued by thousands 
in the learned world. It was a tendency 
which had the honour of being the last in 
history to embody itself in a distinct mythical 
cycle. ** Doctor Faustus " may probably have 
had an historical germ ; but in any case 
** Doctor Faustus,'' as known to legend and 
to literature, is merely a personification of the 
practical side of the new learning. 

The minds of men were waking up to interest 
in nature. There was one man, Copernicus, 
who, at least partially, struck through the 
traditionary atmosphere in which nature was 
enveloped, and to his insight we owe the 
foundation of astronomical science ; but other- 
wise the whole intellectual atmosphere was 
charged with occult views. In fact, the 
learned world of the sixteenth century would 
have found itself quite at home in the preten- 
sions and fancies of our modern theosophist 
and psychical researchers, with their notions 
of making erstwhile miracles non -miracu- 
lous, of reducing the marvellous to being 



32 GERMAN CULTURE 

merely the result of penetration on the 
part of certain seers and investigators of the 
secret powers of nature. Every wonder- 
worker was received with open arms by 
learned and unlearned alike. The possibility 
of producing that which was out of the 
ordinary range of natural occurrences was not 
seriously doubted by any. Spells and enchant- 
ments, conjurations, calculations of nativities, 
were matters earnestly investigated at Univer- 
sities and Courts. 

There were, of course, persons who were 
eager to detect impostors : and amongst 
them some of the most zealous votaries of 
the occult arts — for example, Trittheim 
and the learned Humanist, Conrad Muth 
or Mutianus, both of whom professed to have 
regarded Faust as a fraudulent person. But 
this did not imply any disbelief in the possi- 
bility of the alleged pretensions. In the Faust- 
myth is embodied, moreover, the opposition 
between the new learning on its physical side 
and the old religious faith. The theory that 
the investigation of the mysteries of nature 
had in it something sinister and diabolical 
which had been latent throughout the Middle 
Ages, was brought into especial prominence by 
the new religious movements. The popular 
feeling that the line between natural magic and 
the black art was somewhat doubtful, that the 



INTRODUCTORY 33 

one had a tendency to shade off into the other, 
now received fresh stimulus. The notion of 
compacts with the devil was a familiar one, 
and that they should be resorted to for the 
purpose of acquiring an acquaintance with 
hidden lore and magical powers seemed quite 
natural. 

It will have already been seen from what 
we have said that the religious revolt was 
largely economical in its causes. The intense 
hatred, common alike to the smaller nobility, 
the burghers, and the peasants, of the eccle- 
siastical hierarchy, was obviously due to its 
ever-increasing exactions. The chief of these 
were the pallium or price paid to the Pope for 
an ecclesiastical investiture ; the annates or 
first year's revenues of a church fief ; and the 
tithes which were of two kinds, the great tithe 
paid in agricultural produce, and the small tithe 
consisting in a head of cattle . The latter 
seems to have been especially obnoxious to the 
peasant. The sudden increase in the sale of 
indulgences, like the proverbial last straw, 
broke down the whole system ; but any other 
incident might have served the purpose equally 
well. The prince -prelates were, in some 
instances, at the outset, not averse to the 
movement ; they would not have been indis- 
posed to have converted their territories into 
secular fiefs of the empire. It was only after 

3 



34 GERMAN CULTURE 

this hope had been abandoned that they 
definitely took sides with the Papal authority. 
The opening of the sixteenth century thus 
presents to us mediaeval society, social, 
political, and religious, in Germany as else- 
where, ** run to seed." The feudal organiza- 
tion was outwardly intact ; the peasant, free 
and bond, formed the foundation ; above him 
came the knighthood or inferior nobility ; 
parallel with them was the Ehrharkeit of the 
less important towns, holding from mediate 
lordship ; above these towns came the free 
cities, which held immediately from the 
empire, organized into three bodies, a govern- 
ing Council in which the Ehrharkeit usually 
predominated, where they did not entirely com- 
pose it, a Common Council composed of the 
masters of the various guilds, and the General 
Council of the free citizens. Those journey- 
men, whose condition was fixed from their 
being outside the guild-organizations, usually 
had guilds of their own. Above the free 
cities in the social pyramid stood the Princes 
of the empire, lay and ecclesiastic, with the 
Electoral College, or the seven Electoral 
Princes, forming their head. These consti- 
tuted the feudal " estates " of the empire. 
Then came the *' King of the Romans " ; and, 
as the apex of the whole, the Pope in one 
function and the Emperor in another, crowned 



INTRODUCTORY 35 

the edifice. The supremacy, not merely of 
the Pope but of the complementary temporal 
head of the mediaeval polity, the Emperor, was 
acknowledged in a shadowy way, even in coun- 
tries such as France and England, which had 
no direct practical connection with the empire. 
For, as the spiritual power was also temporal, 
so the temporal political power had, like every- 
thing else in the Middle Ages, a quasi -religious 
significance. 

The minds of men in speculative matters, 
in theology, in philosophy, and in jurispru- 
dence, were outgrowing the old doctrines, at 
least in their old forms. In theology the 
notion of salvation by the faith of the indi- 
vidual, and not through the fact of belonging 
to a corporate organization, which was the 
mediaeval conception, was latent in the minds 
of multitudes of religious persons before ex- 
pression was given to it by Luther. The aver- 
sion to scholasticism, bred by the revived 
knowledge of the older Greek philosophies in 
the original, produced a curious amalgam ; but 
scholastic habits of thought were still dominant 
through it all. The new theories of nature 
amounted to little more than old superstitions, 
systematized and reduced to rule, though here 
and there the later physical science, based on 
observation and experiment, peeped through. 
In jurisprudence the epoch is marked by the 



36 GERMAN CULTURE 

final conquest of the Roman civil law, in its 
spirit, where not in its forms, over the old 
customs, pre-feudal and feudal. 

The subject of Germany during that closing 
period of the Middle Ages, characterized by 
what is known as the revival of learning and 
the Reformation, is so important for an under- 
standing of later German history and the 
especial characteristics of the German culture 
of later times, that we propose, even at the 
risk of wearying some readers, to recapitulate 
in as short a space as possible, compatible 
with clearness, the leading conditions of the 
times — conditions which, directly or indirectly, 
have moulded the whole subsequent course 
of German development. x^ 

Owing to the geographical situation of Ger- 
many and to the political configuration of its 
peoples and other causes, mediaeval con- 
ditions of life as we find them in the 
early sixteenth century left more abiding 
traces on the German mind and on Ger- 
man culture than was the case with some 
other nations. The time was out of joint in 
a very literal sense of that somewhat hack- 
neyed phrase. At the opening of the sixteenth 
century every established institution— political, 
social, and religious— was shaken and showed 
the rents and fissures caused by time and by 
the growth of a new life underneath it. The 



INTRODUCTORY 37 

empire— the Holy Roman — was in a parlous 
way as regarded its cohesion. The power of 
the princes, the representatives of local 
centralized authority, was proving itself too 
strong for the power of the Emperor, the 
recognized representative of centralized 
authority for the whole German-speaking 
world. This meant the undermining and 
eventual disruption of the smaller social and 
political unities/ the knightly manors with the 
privileges attached to the knightly class 
generally. The knighthood, or lower nobility, 
had acted as a sort of buffer between the 
princes of the empire and the Imperial power, 
to which they often looked for protection 
against their immediate overlord or their 
powerful neighbour— the prince. The Imperial 
power, in consequence, found the lower 
nobility a bulwark against its princely 
vassals. Economic changes, the suddenly in- 
creased demand for money owing to the rise 
of the *' world-market," new inventions in the 
art of war, new methods of fighting, the rapidly 
growing importance of artillery, and the 
increase of the mercenary soldier, had 

^ It should be remembered that Germany at this time was 
cut up into feudal territorial divisions of all sizes, from the 
principality, or the prince-bishopric, to the knightly manor. 
Every few miles, and sometimes less, there was a fresh 
territory, a fresh lord, and a fresh jurisdiction. 



38 GERMAN CULTURE 

rendered the lower nobility, as an institu- 
tion, a factor in the political situation which 
was fast becoming negligible. The abortive 
campaign of Franz von Sickingen in 1523 
only showed its hopeless weakness. The 
Reichsregiment, or Imperial governing council, 
a body instituted by Maximilian, had lament- 
ably failed to effect anything towards cement- 
ing together the various parts of the unwieldy 
fabric. Finally, at the Reichstag held in 
Niirnberg, in December 1522, at which all 
the estates were represented, the Reichsregi- 
merit ^ to all intents and purposes, collapsed. 

The Reichstag in question was summoned 
ostensibly for the purpose of raising a subsidy 
for the Hungarians in their struggle against 
the advancing power of the Turks. The 
Turkish movement westward was, of course, 
throughout this period, the most important 
question of what in modern phraseology would 
be called "foreign politics.'' The princes 
voted the proposal of the subsidy without 
consulting the representatives of the cities, who 
knew the heaviest part of the burden was to 
fall upon themselves. The urgency of the 
situation, however, weighed with them, with 
the result that they submitted after consider- 
able remonstrance. The princes, in conjunc- 
tion with their rivals, the lower nobility, next 
proceeded to attack the commercial monopolies, 



INTRODUCTORY 39 

the first fruits of the rising capitalism, the 
appanage mainly of the trading companies and 
the merchant magnates of the towns. This 
was too much for civic patience. The city 
representatives, who, of course, belonged to 
the civic aristocracy, waxed indignant. The 
feudal orders went on to claim the right to 
set up vexatious tariffs in their respective 
territories, whereby to hinder artificially the 
free development of the new commercial 
capitalist. This filled up the .cup of 
endurance of the magnates of the city. The 
city representatives refused their consent to the 
Turkish subsidy and withdrew. The next step 
was the sending of a deputation to the young 
Emperor Karl, who was in Spain, and whose 
sanction to the decrees of the Reichstag was 
necessary before their promulgation. The 
result of the conference held on this occasion 
was a decision to undermine the Reichs- 
regiment and weaken the power of the princes, 
by whom and by whose tools it was manned, 
as a factor in the Imperial constitution. As 
for the princes, while some of their number 
were positively opposed to it, others cared little 
one way or the other. Their chief aim was to 
strengthen and consolidate their power within 
the limits of their own territories, and a weak 
empire was perhaps better adapted for effect- 
ing this purpose than a stronger one, even 



40 GERMAN CULTURE 

though certain of their own order had a con- 
trolhng voice in its administration. As already 
hinted, the collapse of the rebellious knight- 
hood under Sickingen, a few weeks later, 
clearly showed the political drift of the situa- 
tion in the haute politique of the empire. 

The rising capitalists of the city, the 
monopolists, merchant princes, and syndicates, 
are the theme of universal invective through- 
out this period. To them the rapid and 
enormous rise in prices during the early years 
of the sixteenth century, the scarcity of 
money consequent on the increased demand 
for it, and the impoverishment of large sec- 
tions of the population, were attributed by 
noble and peasant alike. The whole trend 
of public opinion, in short, outside the 
wealthier burghers of the larger cities — the 
class immediately interested — was adverse to 
the condition of things created by the new 
world-market, and by the new class embodying 
it. At present it was a small class, the only 
one that gained by it, and that gained at the 
expense of all the other classes. 

Some idea of the class -antagonisms of the 
period may be gathered from the statement 
of Ulrich von Hutten about the robber- 
knights already spoken of, in his dialogue 
entitled *' Predones," to the effect that there 
were four orders of robbers in Germany — the 



INTRODUCTORY 41 

knights^ the lawyers, the priests, and the 
merchants (meaning especially the new capi- 
talist merchant-traders or syndicates). Of 
these, he declares the robber-knights to be the 
least harmful. This is naturally only to be 
expected from so gallant a champion of his 
order, the friend and abettor of Sickingen. 
Nevertheless, the seriousness of the robber- 
knight evil, the toleration of which in prin- 
ciple was so deeply ingrained in the public 
opinion of large sections of the population, 
may be judged from the abortive attempts 
made to stop it, at the instance alike of princes 
and of cities, who on this point, if on no 
other, had a common interest. In 1502, for 
example, at the Reichstag held in Gelnhausen 
in that year, certain of the highest princes of 
the empire made a representation that, at least, 
the knights should permit the gathering in of 
the harvest and the vintage in peace. But 
even this modest demand was found to be 
impracticable. The knights had to live in the 
style required by their status, as they 
declared, and where other means were more 
and more failing them, their ancient right 
or privilege of plunder was indispensable to 
their order. Still, Hutten was right so far in 
declaring the knight the most harmless kind 
of robber, inasmuch as, direct as were his 
methods, his sun was obviously setting, while 



42 GERMAN CULTURE 

as much could not be said of the other 
classes named ; the merchant and the lawyer 
were on the rise, and the priest, although 
about to receive a check, was not destined 
speedily to disappear, or to change funda- 
mentally the character of his activity. 

The feudal orders saw their own position 
seriously threatened by the new development 
of things economic in the cities. The guilds 
were becoming crystallized into close corpora- 
tions of wealthy families, constituting a kind 
of second Ehrbarkeit or town patriciate ; the 
numbers of the landless and unprivileged, 
with at most a bare footing in the town con- 
stitution, were increasing in an alarming 
proportion ; the journeyman workman was 
no longer a stage between apprentice and 
master craftsman, but a permanent condition 
embodied in a large and growing class. All 
these symptoms indicated an extraordinary 
economic revolution, which was making itself 
at first directly felt only in the larger cities, 
but the results of which were dislocating the 
social relations of the Middle Ages through- 
out the whole empire. 

Perhaps the most striking feature in this 
dislocation was the transition from direct barter 
to exchange through the medium of money, and 
the consequent suddenly increased importance 
of the role played by usury in the social life 



LNTRODUCTORY 43 

of the time. The scarcity of money is a 
perennial theme of complaint for which the 
new large capitalist -monopolists are made 
responsible. But the class in question was 
itself only a symptom of the general economic 
change. The seeming scarcity of money, 
though but the consequence of the increased 
demand for a circulating medium, was 
explained, to the disadvantage of the hated 
monopolists, by a crude form of the *' mercan- 
tile " theory. The new merchant, in contra- 
distinction to the master craftsman working 
en famille with his apprentices and assistants, 
now often stood entirely outside the processes 
of production, as speculator or middleman ; 
and he, and still more the syndicate who 
fulfilled the like functions on a larger scale 
(especially with reference to foreign trade), 
came to be regarded as particularly obnoxious 
robbers, because interlopers to boot. Unlike 
the knights, they were robbers with a new face . 
The lawyers were detested for much the 
same reason (cf. German Society at the Close 
of the Middle Ages, pp. 219-28). The 
professional lawyer class, since its final 
differentiation from the clerk class in general, 
had made the Roman or civil law its speciality, 
and had done its utmost everywhere to estab- 
lish the principles of the latter in place of 
the old feudal law of earlier mediaeval Europe. 



44 GERMAN CULTURE 

The Roman law was especially favourable to 
the pretensions of the princes, and, from an 
economic point of view, of the nobility in 
general, inasmuch as land was on the new 
legal principles treated as the private property 
of the lord, over which he had full power of 
ownership, and not, as under feudal and 
canon law, as a trust involving duties as well 
as rights. The class of jurists was itself of 
comparatively recent growth in Central Europe, 
and its rapid increase in every portion of the 
empire dated from less than half a century 
back. It may be well understood, therefore, 
why these interlopers, who ignored the ancient 
customary law of the country, and who by 
means of an alien code deprived the poor 
freeholder or copyholder of his land, or 
justified new and unheard-of exactions on the 
part of his lord on the plea that the latter 
might do what he liked with his own, were 
regarded by the peasant and humble man as 
robbers whose depredations were, if anything, 
even more resented than those of their old 
and tried enemy— the plundering knight. 

The priest, especially of the regular orders, 
was indeed an old foe, but his offence had 
now become very rank. From the middle of 
the fifteenth century onwards the stream of 
anti -clerical literature waxes alike in volume 
and intensity. The '* monk " had become the 



INTRODUCTORY 45 

object of hatred and scorn throughout the 
whole lay world. This view of the '' regular " 
was shared, moreover, by not a few of the 
secular clergy themselves. Humanists, who 
were subsequently ardent champions of the 
Church against Luther and the Protestant 
Reformation — men such as Murner and 
Erasmus — had been previously the bitterest 
satirists of the ''friar" and the "monk." 
Amongst the great body of the laity, how- 
ever, though the religious orders came in 
perhaps for the greater share of animosity, 
the secular priesthood was not much better off 
in popular favour, whilst the upper members 
of the hierarchy were naturally regarded as 
the chief blood-suckers of the German people 
in the interests of Rome. The vast revenues 
which both directly in the shape of pallium 
(the price of *' investiture "), annates (first 
year's revenues of appointments), Peter's- 
pence, and recently of indulgences — the latter 
the by no means most onerous exaction, since 
it was voluntary— all these things, taken 
together with what was indirectly obtained 
from Germany, through the expenditure of 
German ecclesiastics on their visits to Rome 
and by the crowd of parasities, nominal 
holders of German benefices merely, but real 
recipients of German substance, who danced 
attendance at the Vatican — obviously consti- 



46 GERMAN CULTURE 

tuted an enormous drain on the resources of 
the country from all the lay classes ahke, of 
which wealth the papal chair could be plainly 
seen to be the receptacle. 

If we add to these causes of discontent the 
vastness in number of the regular clergy, the 
'* friars " and *' monks " already referred to, 
who consumed, but were only too obviously 
unproductive, it will be sufficiently plain that 
the Protestant Reformation had something very 
much more than a purely speculative basis to 
work upon. Religious reformers there had 
been in Germany throughout the Middle 
Ages, but their preachings had taken no 
deep root. The powerful personality of the 
Monk of Wittenberg found an economic soil 
ready to hand in which his teachings could 
fructify, and hence the world-historic result. 
The peasant revolts, sporadic the Middle 
Ages through, had for the half-century pre- 
ceding the Reformation been growing in 
frequency and importance, but it needed 
nevertheless the sudden impulse, the powerful 
jar given by a Luther in i 5 1 7, and the series 
of blows with which it was followed during 
the years immediately succeeding, to crystallize 
the mass of fluid discontent and social unrest 
in its various forms and give it definite direc- 
tion. The blow which was primarily struck 
in the region of speculative thought and 



INTRODUCTORY 47 

ecclesiastical relations did not stop there in 
its effects. The attack on the dominant 
theological system — at first merely on certain 
comparatively unessential outworks of that 
system — necessarily of its own force developed 
into an attack on the organization represent- 
ing it, and on the economic basis of the latter. 
The battle against ecclesiastical abuses, again, 
in its turn, focussed the ever-smouldering dis- 
content with abuses in general ; and this time, 
not in one distrtict only, but simultaneously 
over the whole of Germany. The movement 
inaugurated by Luther gave to the peasant 
groaning under the weight of baronial oppres- 
sion, and the small handicraftsman suffering 
under his Ehrbarkeit, a rallying-point and a 
rallying cry. 

In history there is no movement which starts 
up full grown from the brain of any one man, 
or even from the mind of any one generation 
of men, like Athene from the head of Zeus. 
The historical epoch which marks the crisis 
of the given change is, after all, little beyond 
a prominent landmark — a parting of the ways 
— led up to by a long preparatory development . 
This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than 
in the Reformation and its accompanying 
movements. The ideas and aspirations animat- 
ing the social, political, and intellectual revolt 
of the sixteenth century can each be traced 



48 GERMAN CULTURE 

back to, at least, the beginning of the fifteenth 
century, and in many cases farther still. The 
way the German of Luther's time looked at 
the burning questions of the hour was not 
essentially different from the way the English 
Wyclifites and Lollards, or the Bohemian 
Hussites and Taborites viewed them. There 
was obviously a difference born of the later 
time, but this difference was not, I repeat, 
essential. The changes which, a century 
previously, were only just beginning, had, 
meanwhile, made enormous progress. 

The disintegration of the material conditions 
of mediaeval social life was now approaching its 
completion, forced on by the inventions and 
discoveries of the previous half -century. But 
the ideals of the mass of men, learned and 
simple, were still in the main the ideals that 
had been prevalent throughout the whole of 
the later Middle Ages. Men still looked at 
the world and at social progress through 
mediaeval spectacles. The chief difference 
was that now ideas which had previously 
been confined to special localities, or had only 
had a sporadic existence among the people at 
large, had become general throughout large 
portions of. the population. The invention of 
the art of printing was, of course, largely 
instrumental in effecting this change. 

The comparatively sudden popularization of 



INTRODUCTORY 49 

doctrines previously confined to special circles 
was the distinguishing feature of the intellec- 
tual life of the first half of the sixteenth 
century. Among the many illustrations of the 
foregoing which might be given, we are 
specially concerned here to note the sudden 
popularity during this period of two imaginary 
constitutions dating from early in the previous 
century. From the fourteenth century we find 
traces, perhaps suggested by the Prester John 
legend, of a deliverer in the shape of an 
emperor who should come from the East, who 
should be the last of his name ; should right 
all wrongs ; should establish the empire in 
universal justice and peace ; and, in short, 
should be the forerunner of the kingdom of 
Christ on earth. This notion or mystical 
hope took increasing root during the fifteenth 
century, and is to be found in many respects 
embodied in the spurious constitutions men- 
tioned, which bore respectively the names of 
the Emperors Sigismund and Friedrich. It was 
in this form that the Hussite theories were 
absorbed by the German mind. The hopes 
of the Messianists of the '' Holy Roman 
Empire " were centred at one time in the 
Emperor Sigismund. Later on the role of 
Messiah was carried over to his successor, 
Friedrich HI, upon whom the hopes of the 
German people were cast. 

4 



50 GERMAN CULTURE 

The Reformation of Kaiser Sigismand, 
originally written about 1438, went through 
several editions before the end of the century, 
and was as many times reprinted during the 
opening years of Luther's movement. Like its 
successor, that of Friedrich, the scheme at- 
tributed to Sigismund proposed the abolition 
of the recent abuses of feudalism, of the new 
lawyer class, and of the symptoms already 
making themselves felt of the change from 
barter to money payments. It proposed, in 
short, a return to primitive conditions. It 
was a scheme of reform on a Biblical basis, 
embracing many elements of a distinctly 
communistic character, as communism was 
then understood. It was pervaded with the 
idea of equality in the spirit of the Taborite 
literature of the age, from which it took its 
origin . 

The so-called Reformation of Kaiser Sigis- 
mund dealt especially with the peasantry — 
the serfs and villeins of the time ; that 
attributed to Friedrich was mainly concerned 
with the rising population of the towns. All 
towns and communes were to undergo a 
constitutional transformation . Handicraftsmen 
should receive just wages ; all roads should 
be free ; taxes, dues, and levies should be 
abolished ; trading capital was to be limited 
to a maximum of 10,000 gulden; all surplus 



INTRODUCTORY 51 

capital should fall to the Imperial authorities, 
who should lend it in case of need to poor 
handicraftsmen at 5 per cent. ; uniformity of 
coinage and of weights and measures was to 
be decreed, together with the abolition of the 
Roman and Canon law. Legists, priests, and 
princes were to be severely dealt with. But, 
curiously enough, the middle and lower 
nobility, especially the knighthood, were more 
tenderly handled, being treated as themselves 
victims of their feudal superiors, lay and 
ecclesiastic, especially the latter. In this con- 
nection the secularization of ecclesiastical fiefs 
was strongly insisted on. 

As men found, however, that neither the 
Emperor Sigismund, nor the Emperor Fried- 
rich III, nor the Emperor Maximilian, upon 
each of whom successively their hopes had 
been cast as the possible realization of the 
German Messiah of earlier dreams, fulfilled 
their expectations, nay, as each in succession 
implicitly belied these hopes, showing no 
disposition whatever to act up to the views 
promulgated in their names, the tradition of 
the Imperial deliverer gradually lost its 
force and popularity. By the opening of the 
Lutheran Reformation the opinion had become 
general that a change would not come from 
above, but that the initiative must rest with the 
people themselves — with the classes specially 



52 GERMAN CULTURE 

oppressed by existing conditions, political, 
economic, and ecclesiastical — to effect by their 
own exertions such a transformation as was 
shadowed forth in the spurious constitutions. 
These, and similar ideas, were now everywhere 
taken up and elaborated, often in a still more 
radical sense than the original ; and they 
everywhere found hearers and adherents. 

The '' true inwardness " of the change, of 
which the Protestant Reformation represented 
the ideological side, meant the transformation 
of society from' a basis mainly corporative and 
co-operative to one individualistic in its essen- 
tial character. The whole polity of the Middle 
Ages, industrial, social, political, ecclesiastical, 
was based on the principle of the group or the 
community— ranging in hierarchical order from 
the trade -guild to the town corporation ; from 
the town corporation through the feudal orders 
to the Imperial throne itself ; from the single 
monastery to the order as a whole ; and from 
the order as a whole to the complete hierarchy 
of the Church as represented by the papal 
chair. The principle of this social organiza- 
tion was now breaking down. The modern 
and bourgeois conception of the autonomy of 
the individual in all spheres of life was 
beginning to affirm itself. 

The most definite expression of this new 
principle asserted itself in the religious sphere. 



INTRODUCTORY 53 

The individualism which was inherent in 
early Christianity, but which was present as 
a speculative content merely, had not been 
strong enough to counteract even the remains 
of corporate tendencies on the material side of 
things, in the decadent Roman Empire ; and 
infinitely less so the vigorous group-organiza- 
tion and sentiment of the northern nations, with 
their tribal society and communistic traditions 
still mainly intact. And these were the 
elements out of which mediaeval society arose. 
Naturally enough the new religious tendencies 
in revolt against the medieval corporate 
Christianity of the Catholic Church seized upon 
this individualistic element in Christianity, de- 
claring the chief end of religion to be a 
personal salvation, for the attainment of which 
the individual himself was sufficing, apart from 
Church organization and Church tradition. 
This served as a valuable destructive weapon 
for the iconoclasts in their attack on ecclesias- 
tical privilege ; consequently, in religion, this 
doctrine of Individualism rapidly made head- 
way. But in more material matters the old 
corporative instinct was still too strong and the 
conditions were as yet too imperfectly ripe 
for the speedy triumph of Individualism. 

The conflict of the two tendencies is 
curiously exhibited in the popular movements 
of the Reformation -time. As enemies of the 



54 GERMAN CULTURE 

decaying and obstructive forms of Feudalism 
and Church organization, the peasant and 
handicraftsman were necessarily on the side of 
the new Individualism. So far as negation and 
destruction were concerned, they were working 
apparently for the new order of things— that 
new order of things which longo intervallo has 
finally landed us in the developed capitalistic 
Individualism of the twentieth century. Yet 
when we come to consider their constructive 
programmes we find the positive demands put 
forward are based either on ideal conceptions 
derived from reminiscences of primitive com- 
munism, or else that they distinctly postulate a 
return to a state of things— the old mark- 
organisation— upon which the later feudalism 
had in various ways encroached, and finally 
superseded. Hence they were, in these respects, 
not merely not in the trend of contemporary 
progress, but in actual opposition to it ; and 
therefore, as Lassalle has justly remarked, they 
were necessarily and in any case doomed to 
failure in the long run. 

This point should not be lost sight of in 
considering the various popular movements 
of the earlier half of the sixteenth century. 
The world was still essentially mediaeval ; 
men were still dominated by mediaeval 
ways of looking at things and still im- 
mersed in mediaeval conditions of life. It is 



INTRODUCTORY 55 

true that out of this mediaeval soil the new 
individualistic society was beginning to grow, 
but its manifestations were as yet not so uni- 
versally apparent as to force a recognition of 
their real meaning. It was still possible to 
regard the various symptoms of change, 
numerous as they were, and far-reaching as 
we now see them to have been, as sporadic 
phenomena, as rank but unessential over- 
growths on the old society, which it was 
possible by pruning and the application of 
other suitable remedies to get rid of, and 
thereby to restore a state of pristine health in 
the body political and social. 

Biblical phrases and the notion of Divine 
Justice now took the place in the popular 
mind formerly occupied by Church and 
Emperor. All the then oppressed classes of 
society— the small peasant, half villein, half 
free-man ; the landless journeyman and town- 
proletarian ; the beggar by the wayside ; the 
small master, crushed by usury or tyrannized 
over by his wealthier colleague in the guild, or 
by the town-patriciate ; even the impoverished 
knight, or the soldier of fortune defrauded of 
his pay ; in short, all with whom times were 
bad, found consolation for their wants and 
troubles, and at the same time an incentive to 
action, in the notion of a Divine Justice which 
should restore all things, and the advent of 



56 GERMAN CULTURE 

which was approaching. All had Biblical 
phrases tending in the direction of their im- 
mediate aspirations in their mouths. 

As bearing on the development and propa- 
ganda of the new ideas, the existence of a new 
intellectual class, rendered possible by the 
new method of exchange through money (as 
opposed to that of barter), which for a genera- 
tion past had been in full swing in the larger 
towns, must not be forgotten. Formerly land 
had been the essential condition of livelihood ; 
now it was no longer so. The " universal 
equivalent," money, conjoined with the print- 
ing press, was rendering a literary class proper, 
for the first time, possible. In the same way 
the teacher, physician, and the small lawyer 
were enabled to subsist as followers of inde- 
pendent professions, apart from the special 
service of the Church or as part of the court - 
retinue of some feudal potentate. To these we 
must add a fresh and very important section 
of the intellectual class which also now for 
the first time acquired an independent existence 
—to wit, that of the public official or func- 
tionary. This change, although only one of 
many, is itself specially striking as indicating 
the transition from the barbaric civilization of 
the Middle Ages to the beginnings of the 
civilization of the modern world. We have, 
in short, before us, as already remarked, a 



INTRODUCTORY 57 

period in which the Middle Ages, whilst still 
dominant, have their force visibly sapped by 
the growth of a new life. 

To sum up the chief features of this new 
life : Industrially, we have the decline of the 
old system of production in the countryside 
in which each manor or, at least, each district, 
was for the most part self-sufficing and self- 
supporting, where production was almost 
entirely for immediate use, and only the 
surplus was exchanged, and where such ex- 
change as existed took place exclusively under 
the form of barter. In place of this, we find 
now something more than the beginnings of 
a national -market and distinct traces of that of 
a world-market. In the towns the change was 
even still more marked. Here we have a 
sudden and hothouse-like development of the 
influence of money. The guild-system, origin- 
ally designed for associations of craftsmen, for 
which the chief object was the man and the 
work, and not the mere acquirement of profit, 
was changing its character. The guilds were 
becoming close corporations of privileged capi- 
talists, while a commercial capitalism, as 
already indicated, was raising its head in all 
the larger centres. In consequence of this state 
of things, the rapid development of the towns 
and of commerce, national and international, 
and the economic backwardness of the country- 



58 GERMAN CULTURE 

side, a landless proletariat was being formed, 
which meant on the one hand an enormous 
increase in mendicancy of all kinds, and on the 
other the creation of a permanent class of only 
casually-employed persons, whom the towns 
absorbed indeed, but for the most part with 
a new form of citizenship involving only the 
bare right of residence within the walls. 
Similar social phenomena were, of course, 
manifesting themselves contemporaneously in 
other parts of Europe ; but in Germany the 
change was more sudden than elsewhere, and 
was complicated by special political circum- 
stances . 

The political and military functions of that 
for the mediaeval polity of Germany, so im- 
portant class, the knighthood, or lower nobility, 
had by this time become practically obsolete, 
mainly owing to the changed conditions of 
warfare. But yet the class itself was numerous, 
and still, nominally at least, possessed of most 
of its old privileges and authority. The extent 
of its real power depended, however, upon 
the absence or weakness of a central power, 
whether Imperial or State-territorial. The 
attempt to reconstitute the centralized power 
of the empire under Maximilian, of which the 
Reichsregiment was the outcome, had, as we 
have seen, not proved successful. Its means 
of carrying into effect its own decisions were 



INTRODUCTORY 59 

hopelessly inadequate. In 1523 it was already 
weakened, and became little more than a 
*' survival " after the Reichstag held at Niirn- 
berg in 1524. Thus this body, which had 
been called into existence at the instance of the 
most powerful estates of the empire, was 
** shelved " with the practically unanimous 
consent of those who had been instrumental in 
creating it. 

But if the attempt at Imperial centraliza- 
tion had failed, the force of circumstances 
tended partly for this very reason to favour 
State-territorial centralization. The aim of 
all the territorial magnates, the higher 
members of the Imperial system, was to con- 
solidate their own princely power within the 
territories owing them allegiance. This desire 
played a not unimportant part in the estab- 
lishment of the Reformation in certain parts 
of the country— for example, in Wurtemberg, 
and in the northern lands of East Prussia which 
were subject to the Grand Master of the 
Teutonic knights. The time was at hand for 
the transformation of the mediaeval feudal terri- 
tory, with its local jurisdictions and its ties of 
service, into the modern bureaucratic state, with 
its centralized administration and organized 
system of salaried functionaries subject to a 
central authority. 

The religious movement inaugurated by 



6o GERMAN CULTURE 

Luther met and was absorbed by all these 
elements of change. It furnished them with 
a religious flag, under cover of which they 
could work themselves out. This was neces- 
sary in an age when the Christian theology was 
unquestioningl)^ accepted in one or another 
form by wellnigh all men, and hence entered 
as a practical belief into their daily thoughts 
and lives. The Lutheran Reformation, from its 
inception in i 5 1 7 down to the Peasants' War 
of 1525, at once absorbed, and was absorbed 
by, all the revolutionary elements of the time. 
Up to the last -mentioned date it gathered 
revolutionary force year by year. But this was 
the turning point. 

With the crushing of the peasants' revolt 
and the decisively anti -popular attitude 
taken up by Luther, the religious move- 
ment associated with him ceased any longer 
to have a revolutionary character. It hence- 
forth became definitely subservient to the 
new interests of the wealthy and privileged 
classes, and as such completely severed itself 
from the more extreme popular reforming 
sects . 

Up to this time, though by no means always 
approved by Luther himself or his immediate 
followers, and in some cases even combated by 
them, the latter were nevertheless not looked 
upon with disfavour by large numbers of the 



INTRODUCTORY 6i 

rank and file of those who regarded Martin 
Luther as their leader. 

Nothing could exceed the violence of 
language with which Luther himself attacked 
all who stood in his way. Not only 
the ecclesiastical, but also the secular heads 
of Christendom came in for the coarsest 
abuse ; '* swine " and '' water-bladder " are not 
the strongest epithets employed. But this was 
not all ; in his Treatise on Temporal Authority 
arid how far it should be Obeyed (published in 
1523), whilst professedly maintaining the 
thesis that the secular authority is a Divine 
ordinance, Luther none the less expressly 
justifies resistance to all human authority where 
its mandates are contrary to ** the word of 
God." At the same time, he denounces in 
his customary energetic language the existing 
powers generally. ** Thou shouldst know," he 
says, ** that since the beginning of the world a 
wise prince is truly a rare bird, but a pious 
prince is still more rare." '* They " (princes) 
'* are mostly the greatest fools or the greatest 
rogues on earth ; therefore must we at all times 
expect from them the worst, and little good." 
Farther on, he proceeds : ** The common man 
begetteth understanding, and the plague of the 
princes worketh powerfully among the people 
and the common man. He will not, he 
cannot, he purposeth not, longer to suffer your 



62 GERMAN CULTURE 

tyranny and oppression. Dear princes and 
lords, know ye what to do, for God will na 
longer endure it? The world is no more as 
of old time, when ye hunted and drove the 
people as your quarry. But think ye to carry 
on with much drawing of sword, look to it 
that one do not come who shall bid ye sheath 
it, and that not in God's name ! " 

Again, in a pamphlet published the fol- 
lowing year, 1524, relative to the Reichstag 
of that year, Luther proclaims that the 
juidglment of God already awaits *' the 
drunken and mad princes." He quotes 
the phrase : *' Deposuit potentes de sede " 
(Luke i. 52), and adds *' that is your case, 
dear lords, even now when ye see it not ! " 
After an admonition to subjects to refuse to go 
forth to war against the Turks, or to pay taxes 
towards resisting them, who were ten times 
wiser and more godly than German princes, the 
pamphlet concludes with the prayer : ** May 
God deliver us from ye all, and of His grace 
give us other rulers ! " Against such utter- 
ances as the above, the conventional exhorta- 
tions to Christian humility, non-resistance, and 
obedience to those in authority, would naturally 
not weigh in a time of popular ferment. So, 
until the momentous year 1525, it was not 
unnatural that, notwithstanding his quarrel with 
Miinzer and the Zwickau enthusiasts, and with 



INTRODUCTORY 63 

others whom he deemed to be going " too far/' 
Luther should have been regarded as in some 
sort the central figure of the revolutionary 
movement, political and social, no less than 
religious . 

But the great literary and agitatory forces 
during the period referred to were of course 
either outside the Lutheran movement proper 
or at most only on the fringe of it. A mass 
of broadsheets and pamphlets, specimens of 
some of which have been given in a former 
volume {German Society at the Close of the 
Middle Ages, pp . 114-28), poured from 
the press during these years, all with the re- 
frain that things had gone on long enough, 
that the common man, be he peasant or towns- 
man, could no longer bear it. But even more 
than the revolutionary literature were the 
wandering preachers effective in working up 
the agitation which culminated in the Peasants' 
War of 1525. The latter comprised men of 
all classes, from the impoverished knight, the 
poor priest, the escaped monk, or the travelling 
scholar, to the peasant, the mercenary soldier 
out of employment, the poor handicraftsman, 
of even the beggar. Learned and simple, 
they wandered about from place to place, in 
the market place of the town, in the common 
field of the village, from one territory to 
another, preaching the gospel of discontent. 



64 GERMAN CULTURE 

Their harangues were, as a rule, as much 
poHtical as religious, and the ground tone of 
them all was the social or economic misery of 
the time, and the urgency of immediate action 
to bring about a change. As in the literature, 
so in the discourses. Biblical phrases designed 
to give force to the new teaching abounded. 
The more thorough -going of these itinerant 
apostles openly aimed at nothing less than the 
establishment of a new Christian Common- 
wealth, or, as they termed it, " the Kingdom 
of God on Earth.'' 



CHAPTER I 

THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT 

The ** great man " theory of history, formerly 
everywhere prevalent, and even now common 
among non-historical persons, has long re- 
garded the Reformation as the purely personal 
work of the Augustine monk who was its 
central figure. The fallacy of this conception 
is particularly striking in the case of the 
Reformation. Not only was it preceded by 
numerous sporadic outbursts of religious 
revivalism which sometimes took the shape of 
opposition to the dominant form of Christianity, 
though it is true they generally shaded off into 
mere movements of independent Catholicism 
within the Church ; but there were in addi- 
tion at least two distinct religious movements 
which led up to it, while much which, under 
the reformers of the sixteenth century, appears 
as a distinct and separate theology, is trace- 
able in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 
in the mystical movement connected with the 
names of Meister Eckhart and Tauler. Meister 

65 '' 



66 GERMAN CULTURE 

Eckhart, whose free treatment of Christian 
doctrines, in order to bring them into conso- 
nance with his mystical theology, had drawn 
him into conflict with the Papacy, undoubtedly 
influenced Luther through his disciple, Tauler, 
and especially through the book which pro- 
ceeded from the latter's school, the Deutsche 
Theologie. It is, however, in the much more 
important movement, which originated with 
Wyclif and extended to Central Europe 
through Huss, that we must look for the more 
obvious influences determining the course of 
religious development in Germany. 

The Wyclifite movement in England was 
less a doctrinal heterodoxy than a revolt 
against the Papacy and the priestly hierarchy. 
Mere theoretical speculations were seldom in- 
terfered with, but anything which touched 
their material interests at once aroused the 
vigilance of the clergy. It is noticeable that 
the diffusion of Lollardism, that is of the 
ideas of Wyclif, if not the cause of, was at 
least followed by the peasant rising under the 
leadership of John Ball, a connection which 
is also visible in the Tziska revolt following 
the Hussite movement, and the Peasants' War 
in Germany which came on the heels of the 
Lutheran Reformation. How much Huss was 
directly influenced by the teachings of Wyclif 
is clear. The works of the latter were 



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT 67 

widely circulated throughout Europe ; for 
one of the advantages of the custom of 
writing in Latin, which was universal during 
the Middle Ages, was that books of an im- 
portant character were immediately current 
amongst all scholars without having, as now, 
to wait upon the caprice and ability of trans- 
lators. Huss read Wyclif's works as the 
preparation for his theological degree, and 
subsequently made them his text-books when 
teaching at the University of Prague. After 
his treacherous execution at Constance, and 
the events which followed thereupon in 
Bohemia, a number of Hussite fugitives settled 
in Southern Germany, carrying with them the 
seeds of the new doctrines. An anonymous 
contemporary writer states that ** to John Huss 
and his followers are to be traced almost all 
those false principles concerning the power of 
the spiritual and temporal authorities and the 
possession of earthly goods and rights which 
before in Bohemia, and now with us, have 
called forth revolt and rebellion, plunder, 
arson, and murder, and have shaken to its 
foundations the whole commonwealth. The 
poison of these false doctrines has been long 
flowing from Bohemia into Germany, and will 
produce the same desolating consequences 
wherever it spreads." 

The condition of the Catholic Church, 



68 GERMAN CULTURE ^J 

against which the Reformation movement 
generally was a protest, needs here to be made 
clear to the reader. The beginning of clerical 
disintegration is distinctly visible in the first 
half of the fourteenth century. The inter- 
dicts, as an institution, had ceased to be re- 
spected, and the priesthood itself began openly 
to sink itself in debauchery and to play fast 
and loose with the rites of the Church. Indul- 
gences for a hundred years were readily 
granted for a consideration. The manufacture 
of relics became an organized branch of in- 
dustry ; and festivals of fools and festivals 
of asses were invented by the jovial priests 
themselves in travesty of sacred mysteries, as 
a welcome relaxation from the monotony of 
prescribed ecclesiastical ceremony. Pilgrim- 
ages increased in number and frequency ; new 
saints were created by the dozen ; and the 
disbelief of the clergy in the doctrines they 
professed was manifest even to the most 
illiterate, whilst contempt for the ceremonies 
they practised was openly displayed in the per- 
formance of their clerical functions. An illus- 
tration of this is the joke of the priests 
related by Luther, who were wont during the 
celebration of the Mass, when the worshippers 
fondly imagined that the sacred formula of 
transubstantiation was being repeated, to re- 
place the words Panis es et carnem fiebis, 



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT 69 

'* Bread thou art and flesh thou shalt become," 
by Partis es et panis manebis, '' Bread thou 
art and bread thou shalt remain." 

The scandals as regards clerical manners, 
growing, as they had been, for many genera- 
tions, reached their climax in the early part 
of the sixteenth century. It was a common 
thing for priests to drive a roaring trade as 
moneylenders, landlords of alehouses and 
gambling dens, and„ even in some cases, 
brothel-keepers. Papal ukases had proved 
ineffective to stem the current of clerical 
abuses. The regular clergy evoked even more 
indignation than the secular. '* Stinking 
cowls " was a favourite epithet for the monks. 
Begging, cheating, shameless ignorance, 
drunkenness, and debauchery, are alleged as 
being their noted characteristics. One of the 
princes of the empire addresses a prior of a 
convent largely patronized by aristocratic 
ladies as *' Thou, our common brother-in- 
law ! " In some of the convents of Fries - 
land, promiscuous intercourse between the 
sexes was, it is said, quite openly practised, 
the offspring being reared as monks and nuns. 
The different orders competed with each other 
for the fame and wealth to be obtained out 
of the public credulity. A fraud attempted by 
the Dominicans at Bern, in 1506, with the 
concurrence of the heads of the order through- 



70 GERMAN CULTURE 

out Germany, was one of the main causes of 
that city adopting the Reformation. 

In addition to the increasing burdens of 
investitures, annates, and other Papal dues, 
the brunt of which the German people had 
directly or indirectly to bear, special offence 
was given at the beginning of the sixteenth 
century by the excessive exploitation of the 
practice of indulgences by Leo X for the pur- 
pose of completing the cathedral of St. Peter's 
at Rome. It was this, coming on the top of 
the exactions already rendered necessary by 
the increasijig luxury and debauchery of the 
Papal Court and those of the other eccle- 
siastical dignitaries, that directly led to the 
dramatic incidents with which the Lutheran 
Reformation opened. 

The remarkable personality with which the 
religious side of the Reformation is pre-emi- 
nently associated was a child of his time, who 
had passed through a variety of mental 
struggles, and had already broken through the 
bonds of the old ecclesiasticism before that 
turning-point in his career which is usually 
reckoned the opening of the Reformation, to 
wit — the nailing of the theses on to the door 
of the Schloss-Kirche in Wittenberg on the 
31st of October, 1517. Martin Luther, we 
must always bear in mind, however, was no 
Protestant in the English Puritan sense of the 



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT 71 

word. It was not merely that he retained 
much of what would be deemed by the old- 
fashioned English Protestant *' Romish error " 
in his doctrine, but his practical view of life 
showed a reaction from the ascetic pretensions 
which he had seen bred nothing but hypocrisy 
and the worst forms of sensual excess. It is, 
indeed, doubtful if the man who sang the 
praises of *' Wine, Women, and Song " would 
have been deemed a fit representative in Par- 
liament or elsewhere by the British Noncon- 
formist conscience of our day ; or would be 
acceptable in any capacity to the grocer- 
deacon of our provincial towns, who, not 
content with being allowed to sand his sugar 
and adulterate his tea unrebuked, would 
socially ostracise every one whose conduct did 
not square with his conventional shibboleths. 
Martin Luther was a child of his time also as 
a boon companion. The freedom of his living 
in the years following his rupture with Rome 
was the subject of severe animadversions on 
the part of the noble, but in this respect 
narrow-minded, Thomas Miinzer, who, in his 
open letter addressed to the *' Soft-living flesh 
of Wittenberg/' scathingly denounces what he 
deems his debauchery. 

It does not enter into our province here 
to discuss at length the religious aspects 
of the Reformation ; but it is interesting 



72 GERMAN CULTURE 

to note in passing the more than modern 
liberality of Luther's views with respect 
to the marriage question and the celibacy 
of the clergy, contrasted with the strong 
mediaeval flavour of his belief in witchcraft 
and sorcery. In his De Captivitate Babylonica 
EcclesioB ( I 5 1 9 ) he expresses the view that 
if, for any cause, husband or wife are pre- 
vented from having sexual intercourse they 
are justified, the woman equally with the man, 
in seeking it elsewhere. He was opposed to 
divorce, though he did not forbid it, and 
recommended that a man should rather have 
a plurality of wives than that he should put 
away any of them. Luther held strenuously 
the view that marriage was a purely external 
contract for the purpose of sexual satis- 
faction, and in no way entered into the 
spiritual life of the man. On this ground he 
sees no objection in the so-called mixed 
marriages, which were, of course, frowned 
upon by the Catholic Church. In his sermon 
on ** Married Life '' he says : ** Know there- 
fore that marriage is an outward thing, like 
any other worldly business. Just as I may 
eat, drink, sleep, walk, ride, buy, speak, and 
bargain with a heathen, a Jew, a Turk, or a 
heretic, 30 may I also be and remain married 
to such an one, and I care not one jot for the 
fool's laws which forbid it. ... A heathen 



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT 73 

is just as much man or woman, well and 
shapely made by God, as St. Peter, St. Paul, 
or St. Lucia." Nor did he shrink from apply- 
ing his views to particular cases, as is in- 
stanced by his correspondence with Philip 
von Hessen, whose constitution appears to have 
required more than one wife. He here lays 
down explicitly the doctrine that polygamy 
and concubinage are not forbidden to Chris- 
tians, though, in his advice to Philip, he adds 
the caveat that he should keep the matter dark 
to the end that offence might not be given. 
** For,'' says he, '* it matters not, provided 
one's conscience is right, what others say." 
In one of his sermons on the Pentateuch ^ we 
find the words : *' It is^ not forbidden that a 
man have more than one wife. I would not 
forbid it to-day, albeit I would not advise 

it Yet neither would I condemn it." 

Other opinions on the nature of the sexual 
relation were equally broad ; for in one of 
his writings on monastic celibacy his words 
plainly indicate his belief that chastity, no 
more than other fleshly mortifications, was to 
be considered a divine ordinance for all men 
or women. In an address to the clergy he 
says : '* A woman not possessed of high and 
rare grace can no more abstain from a man 
than from eating, drinking, sleeping, or other 

' Sdmmtliche Werke, vol. xxxiii. pp. 322-4. 



74 GERMAN CULTURE 

natural function. Likewise a man cannot 
abstain from a woman. The reason is that it 
is as deeply implanted in our nature to breed 
children as it is to eat and drink." ^ The 
worthy Janssen observes in a scandalized tone 
that Luther, as regards certain matters re- 
lating to married life, '* gave expression to 
principles before unheard of in Christian 
Europe " ; 2 ^nd the British Nonconformist 
of to-day, if he reads these '' immoral " 
opinions of the hero of the Reformation, will 
be disposed to echo the sentiments of the 
Ultramontane historian. 

The relation of the Reformation to the 
'' New Learning " was in Germany not unlike 
that which existed in the other northern 
countries of Europe, and notably in England. 
Whilst the hostility of the latter to the 
mediaeval Church was very marked, and it was 
hence disposed to regard the religious 
Reformation as an ally, this had not pro- 
ceeded very far before the tendency of the 
Renaissance spirit was to side with Catholicism 
against the new theology and dogma, as 
merely destructive and hostile to culture. The 
men of the Humanist movement were for the 
most part Free-thinkers, and it was with them 

^ Quoted in Janssen, jEm Zweites Wort an 7neine Kritiker^ 
1883, p. 94. 
2 Geschichte des Deiitschen Volkes^ vol. ii. p. 115. 



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT 75 

that free -thought first appeared in modern 
Europe. They therefore had Uttle sympathy 
with the narrow bigotry of religious reformers, 
and preferred to remain in touch with the 
Church, whose then loose and tolerant 
Catholicism gave freer play to intellectual 
speculations, provided they steered clear of 
overt theological heterodoxy, than the newer 
systems, which, taking theology aa grand 
serieux, tended to regard profane art and 
learning as more or less superfluous, and 
spent their whole time in theological wrangles. 
Nevertheless, there were not wanting men 
who, influenced at first by the revival of learn- 
ing, ended by throwing themselves entirely 
into the Reformation movement, though in 
these cases they were usually actuated rather 
by their hatred of the Catholic hierarchy than 
by any positive religious sentiment. 

Of such men Ulrich von Hutten, the 
descendant of an ancient and influential 
knightly family, was a noteworthy example. 
After having already acquired fame as the 
author of a series of skits in the new Latin 
and other works of classical scholarship, being 
also well known as the ardent supporter of 
Reuchlin in his dispute with the Church, and 
as the friend and correspondent of the central 
Humanist figure of the time, Erasmus, he 
watched with absorbing interest the movement 



76 GERMAN CULTURE 

which Luther had inaugurated. Six months 
after the nailing of the theses at Wittenberg, 
he writes enthusiastically to a friend respecting 
the growing ferment in ecclesiastical matters, 
evidently regarding the new movement as a 
Kilkenny-cat fight. '* The leaders," he says, 
*' are bold and hot, full of courage and zeal. 
Now they shout and cheer, now they lament 
and bewail, as loud as they can. They have 
lately set themselves to write ; the printers 
are getting enough to do. Propositions, 
corollaries, conclusions, and articles are being 
sold. For this alone I hope they will mutually 
destroy each other." '* A few days ago a monk 
was telling me what was going on in Saxony, 
to which I replied : * Devour each other in 
order that ye in turn may be devoured {sic)' 
Pray Heaven that our enemies may fight each 
other to the bitter end, and by their obstinacy 
extinguish each other." 

Thus it will be seen that Hutten 
regarded the Reformation in its earlier 
stages as merely a monkish squabble, 
and failed to see the tremendous up- 
heaval of all the old landmarks of eccle- 
siastical domination which was immanent in 
it. So soon, however, as he perceived its real 
significance, he threw himself wholly into 
the movement. It must not be forgotten, 
moreover, that, although Hutten's zeal for 



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT ^7 

Humanism made him welcome any attempt to 
overthrow the power of the clergy and the 
monks, he had also an eminently political 
motive for his action in what was, in some 
respects, the main object of his life, viz. to 
rescue the '' knighthood,'' or smaller nobility, 
from having their independence crushed out 
by the growing powers of the princes of the 
empire. Probably more than one-third of the 
manors were held by ecclesiastical dignitaries, 
so that anything which threatened their pos- 
sessions and privileges seemed to strike a blow 
at the very foundations of the Imperial system. 
Hutten hoped that the new doctrines would 
set the princes by the ears all round ; and that 
then, by allying themselves with the reforming 
party, the knighthood might succeed in retain- 
ing the privileges which still remained to them, 
but were rapidly slipping away, and might even 
regain some of those which had been already 
lost. It was not till later, however, that 
Hutten saw matters in this light. He was, 
at the time the above letter was written, in the 
service of the Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, 
the leading favourer of the New Learning 
amongst the prince -prelates, and it was mainly 
from the Humanist standpoint that he regarded 
the beginnings of the Reformation. After 
leaving the service of the archbishop he struck 
up a personal friendship with Luther, instigated 



78 GERMAN CULTURE 

thereto by his poHtical chief, Franz von 
Sickingen, the leader of the knighthood, from 
whom he probably received the first intimation 
of the importance of the new movement to their 
common cause. 

When, in 1520, the young Emperor, 
Charles V, was crowned at Aachen, Luther's 
party, as well as the knighthood, expected that 
considerable changes would result in a sense 
favourable to their position from the presumed 
pliability of the new head of the empire. His 
youth, it was supposed, would make him more 
sympathetic to the newer spirit which was 
rapidly developing itself ; and it is true that 
about the time of his election Charles had 
shown a transient favour to the '' recalcitrant 
monk." It would appear, however, that this 
was only for the purpose of frightening the 
Pope into abandoning his declared intention 
of abolishing the Inquisition in Spain, then 
regarded as one of the mainstays of the royal 
power, and still more to exercise pressure upon 
him, in order that he should facilitate Charles's 
designs on the Milanese territory. Once these 
objects were attained, he was just as ready 
to oblige the Pope by suppressing the new 
anti -Papal movement as he might possibly 
otherwise have been to have favoured it with 
a view to humbling the only serious rival to his 
dominion in the empire. 



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT 79 

Immediately after his coronation he pro- 
ceeded to Cologne, and convoked by Imperial 
edict a Reichstag at Worms for the following 
27th of January, 1521. The proceedings of 
this famous Reichstag have been unfortunately 
so identified with the edict against Luther that 
the other important matters which were there 
discussed have almost fallen into oblivion. At 
least two other questions were dealt with, how- 
ever, which are significant of the changes that 
were then taking place. The first was the 
rehabilitation and strengthening of the Imperial 
Governing Council (Reichsregiment), whose 
functions under Maximilian had been little 
more than nominal. There was at first a 
feeling amongst the States in favour of trans- 
ferring all authority to it, even during the 
residence of the Emperor in the empire ; and 
in the end, while having granted to it com- 
plete power during his absence, it practically 
retained very much of this power when he was 
present. In constitution it was very similar to 
the French '' Parliaments," and, like them, was 
principally composed of learned jurists, four 
being elected by the Emperor and the 
remainder by the estates. The character 
and the great powers of this council, extend- 
ing even to ecclesiastical matters during the 
ensuing years, undoubtedly did much to hasten 
on the substitution of the civil law for the 



8o GERMAN CULTURE 

older customary or common law, a matter 
which we shall consider more in detail later 
on. The financial condition of the empire was 
also considered ; and it here first became 
evident that the dislocation of economic 
conditions, which had begun with the century, 
would render an enormously increased taxation 
necessary to maintain the Imperial authority, 
amounting to five times as much as had 
previously been required. 

It was only after these secular affairs of 
the empire had been disposed of that the 
deliberations of the Reichstag on ecclesiastical 
matters were opened by the indictment of 
Luther in a long speech by Aleander, one of 
the papal nuncios, in introducing the Pope's 
letter. In spite of the efforts of his friends, 
Luther was not permitted to be present at the 
beginning of the proceedings ; but subse- 
quently he was sent for by the Emperor, in 
order that he might state his case. His 
journey to Worms was one long triumph, 
especially at Erfurt, where he was received 
with enthusiasm by the Humanists as the 
enemy of the Papacy. But his presence in the 
Reichstag was unavailing, and the proceedings 
resulted in his being placed under the ban of 
the empire. The safe -conduct of the Emperor 
was, however, in his case respected ; and in 
spite of the fears of his friends that a like fate 



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT 8i 

might befall him as had befallen Huss after 
the Council of Constance, he was allowed to 
depart unmolested. 

On his way to Wittenberg Luther was seized, 
by arrangement with his supporter, the Kur- 
fiirst of Saxony, and conveyed in safety to the 
Castle of Wartburg, in Thuringen, a report 
in the meantime being industriously circulated 
by certain of his adherents, with a view of 
arousing popular feeling, that he had been 
arrested by order of the Emperor and was 
being tortured. In this way he was secured 
from all danger for the time being, and 
it was during his subsequent stay that he 
laid the foundations of the literary language 
of Germany. 

Says a contemporary writer, ^ an eye-witness 
of what went on at Worms during the sitting 
of the Reichstag : '' All is disorder and con- 
fusion. Seldom a night doth pass but that 
three or four persons be slain. The Emperor 
hath installed a provost, who hath drowned, 
hanged, and murdered over a hundred men." 
He proceeds : '* Stabbing, whoring, flesh- 
eating (it was in Lent) . . . altogether there 
is an orgie worthy of the Venusberg." He 
further states that many gentlemen and other 
visitors had drunk themselves to death on the 
strong Rhenish wine. Aleander was in danger 

^ Quoted in Jansscn, bk. ii. 162. 
6 



82 GERMAN CULTURE 

of being murdered by the Lutheran populace, 
instigated thereto by Hutten's inflammatory 
letters from the neighbouring Castle of Ebern- 
burg, in which Franz von Sickingen had given 
him a refuge. The fiery Humanist wrote to 
Aleander himself, saying that he would leave 
no stone unturned " till thou who camest hither 
full of wrath, madness, crime, and treachery 
shalt be carried hence a lifeless corpse." 
Aleander naturally felt exceedingly uncomfort- 
able, and other supporters of the Papal party 
were not less disturbed at the threats which 
seemed in a fair way of being carried out . The 
Emperor himself was without adequate means 
of withstanding a popular revolt should it 
occur. He had never been so low in cash or 
in men as at that moment. On the other hand, 
Sickingen, to whom he owed money, and who 
was the only man who could have saved the 
situation under the circumstances, had matters 
come to blows, was almost overtly on the side 
of the Lutherans ; while the whole body of 
the impoverished knighthood were only await- 
ing a favourable opportunity to overthrow the 
power of the magnates, secular and ecclesiastic, 
with Sickingen as a leader. Such was the state 
of affairs at the beginning of the year i 5 2 1 . 

The ban placed upon Luther by the Reich- 
stag marks the date of the complete rupture 
between the Reforming party and the old 



THE REFORMATION MOVEMENT 83 

Church. Henceforward, many Humanist and 
Humanistically influenced persons who had 
supported him withdrew from the movement 
and swelled the ranks of the Conservatives. 
Foremost amongst these were Pirckheimer, the 
wealthy merchant and scholar of Niirnberg, 
and many others, who dreaded lest the attack 
on ecclesiastical property and authority should, 
as indeed was the case, issue in a general attack 
on all property and authority. Thomas Murner, 
also, who was the type of the *' moderate '' of 
the situation, while professing to disapprove 
of the abuses of the Church, declared that 
Luther's manner of agitation could only lead to 
the destruction of all order, civil no less than 
ecclesiastical. The two parties were now 
clearly defined, and the points at issue were 
plainly irreconcilable with one another or 
involved irreconcilable details. _^ 

The printing-press now for the first time 
appeared as the vehicle for popular literature ; 
the art of the bard gave place to the art of 
the typographer, and the art of the preacher 
saw confronting it a formidable rival in that 
of the pamphleteer. Similarly in the French 
Revolution, modern journalism, till then un- 
important and sporadic, received its first great 
development, and began seriously to displace 
alike the preacher, the pamphlet, and the 
broadside. The flood of theological disquisi^' 



84 GERMAN CULTURE _ 

tions, satires, dialogues, sermons, which now 
poured from every press in Germany, over- 
flowed into all classes of society. J These 
writings are so characteristic of the time that 
it is worth while devoting a few pages to their 
consideration, the more especially because it 
will afford us the opportunity for considering 
other changes in that spirit of the age, partly 
diseased growths of decaying mediaevalism 
and partly the beginnings of the modern 
critical spirit, which also find expression in the 
literature of the Reformation period. 



CHAPTER II 
POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE TIME 

In accordance with the conventional view the 
Reichstag at Worms was a landmark in the 
history of the Reformation. This is, however, 
only true as regards the political side of the 
movement. The popular feeling was really 
quite continuous, at least from 1517 to 1525. 
With the latter year and the collapse of the 
peasant revolt a change is noticeable . In i 5 2 5 
the Reformation, as a great upstirring of the 
popular mind of Central Europe, in contra- 
distinction to its character as an academic and 
purely political movement, reached high -water 
mark, and may almost be said to have 
exhausted itself. Until the latter year it was 
purely a revolutionary movement, attracting to 
itself all the disruptive elements of its time. 
Later, the reactionary possibilities within it 
declared themselves. The emancipation from 
the thraldom of the Catholic hierarchy and its 
Papal head, it was soon found, meant not 

emancipation from the arbitrary tyranny of the 

85 



86 GERMAN CULTURE 

new political and centralizing authorities then 
springing up, but, on the contrary, rather their 
consecration. The ultimate outcome, in fact, 
of the whole business was, as we shall see 
later on, the inculcation of the non-resistance 
theory as regards the civil power, and the clear- 
ing of the way for its extremest expression in 
the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, a 
theory utterly alien to the belief and practice 
of the Mediaeval Church. 

The Reichstag of Worms, by cutting off all 
possibility of reconciliation, rather gave further 
edge to the popular revolutionary side of the 
movement than otherwise. The whole progress 
of the change in public feeling is plainly trace- 
able in the mass of ephemeral literature that 
has come down to us from this period, broad- 
sides, pamphlets, satires, folk-songs, and the 
rest. The anonymous literature to which we 
more especially refer is distinguished by its 
coarse brutality and humour, even in the 
writings of the Reformers, which were them- 
selves in no case remarkable for the suavity of 
their polemic. 

Hutten, in some of his later vernacular 
poems, approaches the character of the less- 
cultured broadside literature. To the critical 
mind it is somewhat amusing to note the 
enthusiasm with which the modern Dissenting 
and Puritan class contemplates the period of 



POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE TIME 87 

which we are writing — an enthusiasm that 
would probably be effectively damped if the 
laudators of the Reformation knew the real 
character of the movement and of its principal 
actors. 

The first attacks made by the broadside 
literature were naturally directed against the 
simony and benefice-grabbing of the clergy, 
a characteristic of the priestly office that has 
always powerfully appealed to the popular 
mind. Thus the '* Courtisan and Benefice- 
eater " attacks the parasite of the Roman 
Court, who absorbs ecclesiastical revenues 
wholesale, putting in perfunctory locum tenens 
on the cheap, and begins :— 

I'm fairly called a Simonist and eke a Courtisan, 

And here to every peasant and every com men man 

My knavery will very well appear. 

I called and cried to all who'd give me ear, 

To nobleman and knight and all above me : 

'' Behold me ! And ye'll find Til truly love ye." 

In another we read :— 

The Paternoster teaches well 

How one for another his prayers should tell, 

Thro' brotherly love and not for gold, 

And good those same prayers God doth hold. 

So too saith Holy Paul right clearly, 

Each shall his brother's load bear dearly. 

But now, it declares, all that is changed. 



88 GERMAN CULTURE 

Now we are being taught just the opposite 
of God's teachings :— 

Such doctrine hath the priests increased, 
Whom men as masters now must feast, 
'Fore all the crowd of Simonists, 
Whose waxing number no man wists, 
The towns and thorps seem full of them, 
And in all lands they're seen with shame. 
Their violence and knavery 
Leave not a church or living free. 

A prose pamphlet, apparently published 
about the summer of 1520, shortly after 
Luther's ex-communication, was the so-called 
'* Wolf Song '' (Wolf-gesang), which paints the 
enemies of Luther as wolves. It begins with 
a screed on the creation and fall of Adam, 
and a dissertation on the dogma of the Re- 
demption ; and then proceeds : *' As one might 
say, dear brother, instruct me, for there is now 
in our times so great commotion in faith come 
upon us. There is one in Saxony who is called 
Luther, of whom many pious and honest folk 
tell how that he doth write so consolingly the 
good evangelical {evangeUsche) truth. But 
again I hear that the Pope and the cardinals 
at Rome have put him under the ban as a 
heretic ; and certain of our own preachers, 
too, scold him from their pulpits as a knave, 
a misleader, and a heretic. I am utterly con- 



POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE TIME 89 

founded, and know not where to turn ; albeit 
my reason and heart do speak to me even as 
Luther writeth. But yet again it bethinks me 
that when the Pope, the cardinal, the bishop, 
the doctor, the monk, and the priest, for the 
greater part are against him, and so that all 
save the common men and a few gentlemen, 
doctors, councillors, and knights, are his adver- 
saries, what shall I do?" ''For answer, dear 
friend, get thee back and search the Scriptures, 
and thou shalt find that so it hath gone with 
all the holy prophets even as it now fareth 
with Doctor Martin Luther, who is in truth 
a godly Christian and manly heart and only 
true Pope and Apostle, when he the true office 
of the Apostles publicly fulfilleth. ... If the 
godly man Luther were pleasing to the world, 
that were indeed a true sign that his doctrine 
were not from God ; for the word of God 
is a fiery sword, a hammer that breaketh in 
pieces the rocks, and not a fox's tail or a 
reed that may be bent according to our 
pleasure." Seventeen noxious qualities of the 
wolf are adduced— his ravenousness, his 
cunning, his falseness, his cowardice, his 
thirst for robbery, amongst others. The Popes, 
the cardinals, and the bishops are compared 
to the wolves in all their attributes : '' The 
greater his pomp and splendour, the more 
shouldst thou beware of such an one ; for he 



90 GERMAN CULTURE 

il 

is a wolf that cometh in the shape of a good 

shepherd's dog. Beware ! it is against the 
custom of Christ and His Apostles/' It is 
again but the song of the wolves when they 
claim to mix themselves with worldly affairs 
and maintain the temporal supremacy. The 
greediness of the wolf is discernible in the 
means adopted to get money for the building 
of St. Peter's. The interlocutor is warned 
against giving to mendicant priests and monks. 
We have given this as a specimen of the 
almost purely theological pamphlet ; although, 
as will have been evident, even this is directly 
connected with the material abuses from which 
the people were suffering. Another pamphlet 
of about the same date deals with usury, the 
burden of which had been greatly increased 
by the growth of the new commercial combi- 
nations already referred to in the Introduc- 
tion, which combinations Dr. Eck had been 
defending at Bologna on theological grounds, 
in order to curry favour with the Augsburg 
merchant-prince, Fuggerschwatz.i It is called 
** Concerning Dues. Hither comes a poor 
peasant to a rich citizen. A priest comes also 
thereby, and then a monk. Full pleasant to 
read." A peasant visits a burgher when he 
is counting money, and asks him where he 
gets it all from. '* My dear peasant," says 
^ See Appendix C. 



POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE TIME 91 

the townsman, '' thou askest me who gave me 
this money. I will tell thee. There cometh 
hither a peasant, and beggeth me to lend him 
ten or twenty gulden. Thereupon I ask him 
an he possesseth not a goodly meadow or corn- 
field. ' Yea ! good sir ! ' saith he, ' I have 
indeed a good meadow and a good corn-field. 
The twain are worth a hundred gulden.' Then 
say I to him : ' Good, my friend, wilt thou 
pledge me thy holding ? and an thou givest me 
one gulden of thy money every year I will 
lend thee twenty gulden now.' Then is the 
peasant right glad, and saith he : '* Willingly 
will I pledge it thee.' * I will warn thee,' say 
I, ' that an thou furnishest not the one gulden 
of money each year, I will take thy holding 
for my own having.' Therewith is the peasant 
well content, and write th him down accordingly. 
I lend him the money ; he payeth me one 
year, or may be twain, the due ; thereafter 
can he no longer furnish it, and thereupon I 
take the holding, and drive away the peasant 
therefrom. Thus I get the holding and the 
money. The same things do I with handi- 
craftsmen. Hath he a good house? He 
pledgeth that house until I bring it behind 
me. Therewith gain I much in goods and 
money, and thus do I pass my days." '* I 
thought," rejoined the peasant, " that 'twere 
only the Jew who did usury, but I hear that 



92 GERMAN CULTURE 

ye also ply that trade." The burgher answers 
that interest is not usury, to which the peasant 
replies that interest (Giilt) is only a ** subtle 
name." The burgher then quotes Scripture, 
as commanding men to help one another. The 
peasant readily answers that in doing this they 
have no right to get advantage from the assist- 
ance they proffer. *' Thou art a good 
fellow! " says the townsman. *' If I take no 
money for the money that I lend, how shall 
I then increase my hoard? " The peasant then 
reproaches him that he sees well that his object 
in life is to wax fat on the substance of others ; 
'' But I tell thee, indeed," he says, '' that it 
is a great and heavy sin." Whereupon his 
opponent waxes wroth, and will have nothing 
more to do with him, threatening to kick him 
out in the name of a thousand devils ; but 
the peasant returns to the charge, and ex- 
presses his opinion that rich men do not 
willingly hear the truth. A priest now enters, 
and to him the townsman explains the dis- 
pute. '* Dear peasant," says the priest, 
'' wherefore camest thou hither, that thou 
shouldst make of a due i usury ? May not a 
man buy with his money what he will? " But 
the peasant stands by his previous assertion, 

^ We use the word ** due " here for the German word GuU. 
The corresponding English of the time does not make any 
distinction between GuU or interest, and Wiicher or usury. 



POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE TIME 93 

demanding how anything can be considered as 
bought which is only a pledge. '' We priests/' 
replies the ecclesiastic, '* must perforce lend 
moneys for dues, since thereby we get our 
living '' ; to which, after sundry ejaculations 
of surprise, the peasant retorts : *' Who gave 
to you the power? I well hear ye have 
another God than we poor people. We have 
our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath forbidden such 
money-lending for gain." Hence it comes, he 
goes on, that land is no longer free ; to attempt 
to whitewash usury under the name of due or 
interest, he says, is just the same as if one 
were to call a child christened Friedrich or 
Hansel, Fritz or Hans, and then maintain it 
was no longer the same child. They require 
no more Jews, he says, since the Christians 
have taken their business in hand. The towns- 
man is once more about to turn the peasant 
out of his house when a monk enters. He 
then lays the matter before the new-comer, 
who promises to talk the peasant over with 
soft words ; for, says he, there is nothing 
accomplished with vainglory. He thereupon 
takes him aside and explains it to him by the 
illustration of a merchant whose gain on the 
wares he sells is not called usury, and argues 
that therefore other forms of gain in business 
should not be described by this odious name. 
But the peasant will have none of this com- 



94 GERMAN CULTURE 

parison ; for the merchant, he says, needs to 
incur much risk in order to gain and traffic 
with his wares ; while money-lending on 
security is, on the other hand, without risk 
or labour, and is a treacherous mode of cheat- Jl 
ing. Finding that they can make nothing of 
the obstinate countryman, the others leave 
him ; but he, as a parting shot, exclaims : 
'' Ah, well-a-day ! I would to have talked with 
thee at first, but it is now ended. Farewell, 
gracious sir, and my other kind sirs. I, poor 
little peasant, I go my way. Farewell, fare- 
well, due remains usury for ever more. Yea, 
yea ! due, indeed ! " 

The above specimens of the popular writing 
of the time must suffice. But for the reader 
who wishes to further study this literature we 
give the titles, which sufficiently indicate their 
contents, of a selection of other similar 
pamphlets and broadsheets : '* A New Epistle 
from the Evil Clergy sent to their righteous 
Lord, with an answer from their Lord. Most 
merry to read '' (1521). '* A Great Prize 
which the Prince of Hell, hight Lucifer, now 
offereth to the Clergy, to the Pope, Bishops, 
Cardinals, and their like " ( i 5 2 1 ). *' A 
Written Call, made by the Prince of Hell 
to his dear devoted, of all and every condition 
in his kingdom " ( i 52 1). " Dialogue or Con- 
verse of the Apostolicum, Angelica, and other 



POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE TIME 95 

spices of the Druggist, anent Dr. Martin 
Luther and his disciples " ( 1521). "A Very 
Pleasant Dialogue and Remonstrance from the 
Sheriff of Gaissdorf and his pupil against the 
pastor of the same and his assistant " ( 1521). 
The popularity of '' Karsthans/' an anonymous 
tract, amongst the people is illustrated by the 
publication and wide distribution of a new 
** Karsthans " a few months later, in which it 
is sought to show that the knighthood should 
make common cause with the peasants, the 
dramatis personce being Karsthans and Franz 
von Sickingen. Referring to the same sub- 
ject we find a ** Dialogue which Franciscus 
von Sickingen held fore heaven's gate with 
St. Peter and the Knights of St. George before 
he was let in." This was published in 1523, I 
almost immediately after the death of Sickin- 
gen. " A Talk between a Nobleman, a Monk, 
and a Courtier" (1523). *' A Talk between 
a Fox and a Wolf" (1523). ''A Pleasant 
Dialogue between Dr. Martin Luther and the 
cunning Messenger from Hell" (1523). *' A 
Conversation of the Pope with his Cardinals 
of how it goeth with him, and how he may 
destroy the Word of God. Let every man 
very well note" (1523). ''A Christian and 
Merry Talk, that it is more pleasing to God 
and more wholesome for men to come out 
of the monasteries and to marry, than to tarry 



L 



96 GERMAN CULTURE w^_ 

therein and to burn ; which talk is not with 
human folly and the false teachings thereof, 
but is founded alone in the holy, divine, 
biblical, and evangelical Scripture" (1524). 
** A Pleasant Dialogue of a Peasant with a 
Monk that he should cast his Cowl from him. 
Merry and fair to read'' (1525). 

The above is only a selection taken hap- 
hazard from the mass of fugitive literature 
which the early years of the Reformation 
brought forth. In spite of a certain rough 
but not unattractive directness of diction, a 
prolonged reading of them is very tedious, as 
will have been sufficiently seen from the 
extracts we have given. Their humour is of a 
particularly juvenile and obvious character, and 
consists almost entirely in the childish device 
of clothing the personages with ridiculous but 
non-essential attributes, or in placing them in 
grotesque but pointless situations. Of the 
more subtle humour, which consists in the dis- 
covery of real but hidden incongruities, and 
the perception of what is innately absurd, there 
is no trace. The obvious abuses of the time 
are satirized in this way ad nauseam. The 
rapacity of the clergy in general, the idleness 
and lasciviousness of the monks, the pomp and 
luxury of the prince-prelates, the inconsisten- 
cies of Church traditions and practices with 
Scripture, with which they could now be com- 



POPULAR LITERATURE OF THE TIME 97 

pared, since it was everywhere circulated in 
the vulgar tongue, form their never-ending 
theme. They reveal to the reader a state of 
things that strikes one none the less in English 
literature of the period— the intense interest of 
all classes in theological matters. It shows us 
how they looked at all things through a theo- 
logical lens. Although we have left this phase 
of popular thought so recently behind us, we 
can even now scarcely imagine ourselves back 
into it. The idea of ordinary men, or of the 
vast majority, holding their religion as anything 
else than a very pious opinion absolutely 
unconnected with their daily life, public or 
private, has already become almost inconceiv- 
able to us. In all the writings of the time, the 
theological interest is in the forefront. The 
economic and social groundwork only casually 
reveals itself. This it is that makes the reading 
of the sixteenth-century polemics so insuffer- 
ably jejune and dreary. They bring before 
us the ghosts of controversies in which most 
men have ceased to take any part, albeit they 
have not been dead and forgotten long enough 
to have acquired a revived antiquarian interest. 
The great bombshell which Luther cast 
forth on June 24, 1520, in his address to the 
German nobility,' indeed, contains strong 
appeals to the economical and political neces- 
* An der Christlichen Adel deutscher Nation. 
7 



98 GERMAN CULTURE 

sides of Germany, and therein we see the veil 
torn from the half -unconscious motives that lay 
behind the theological mask ; but, as already 
said, in the popular literature, with a few 
exceptions, the theological controversy rules 
undisputed. 

The noticeable feature of all this irruption of 
the cacoethes scrihendi was the direct appeal to 
the Bible for the settlement not only of strictly 
theological controversies but of points of social 
and political ethics also. This practice, which 
even to the modern Protestant seems insipid 
and played out after three centuries and a half 
of wear, had at that time the to us inconceiv- 
able charm of novelty ; and the perusal of the 
literature and controversies of the time shows 
that men used it with all the delight of a child 
with a new toy, and seemed never tired of the 
game of searching out texts to justify their 
position. The diffusion of the whole Bible in 
the vernacular, itself a consequence of the 
rebellion against priestly tradition and the 
authority of the Fathers, intensified the revolt 
by making the pastime possible to all ranks 
of society. 



CHAPTER III 

THE FOLKLORE OF REFORMATION GERMANY 

Now in the hands of all men, the Bible was 
not made the basis of doctrinal opinions alone. 
It lent its support to many of the popular 
superstitions of the time, and in addition it 
served as the starting-point for new supersti- 
tions and for new developments of the older 
ones. The Pan-daemonism of the New Testa- 
ment, with its wonder -workings by devilish 
agencies, its exorcisms of evil spirits and the 
like, could not fail to have a deep effect on 
the popular mind. The authority that the book 
believed to be divinely inspired necessarily 
lent to such beliefs gave a vividness to the 
popular conception of the devil and his angels, 
which is apparent throughout the whole move- 
ment of the Reformation, and not least in the 
utterances of the great Luther himself. Indeed, 
with the Reformation there comes a complete 
change over the popular conception of the devil 
and diabolical influences. 

It is true that the judicial pursuit of witches 

99 



lOO GERMAN CULTURE 

and witchcraft, in the earlier Middle Ages only 
a sporadic incident, received a great impulse 
from the Bull of Pope Innocent VIII (Dec. 5, 
1484), entitled Summis Desideruntes, to which 
has been given the title of Malleus Male- 
ficorum, or The Hammer of Sorcerers, directed 
against the practice of witchcraft ; but it was 
especially amongst the men of the New Spirit 
that the belief in the prevalence of compacts 
with the devil, and the necessity for suppress- 
ing them, took root, and led to the horrible 
persecutions that distinguished the "Re- 
formed " Churches on the v/hole even more 
than the Catholic. 

Luther himself had a vivid belief, tinging 
all his views and actions, in the ubiquity of the 
devil and his myrmidons. "The devils," says 
he, " are near us, and do cunningly contrive 
every moment without ceasing against our life, 
our salvation, and our blessedness. ... In 
woods, waters, and wastes, and in damp, 
marshy places, there are many devils that 
seek to harm men. In the black and thick 
clouds, too, there are some that make storms, 
hail, lightning, and thunder, that poison the air 
and the pastures. When such things happen, 
the philosophers and the physicians ascribe 
them to the stars, and show I know not what 
causes for such misfortunes and plagues." 
Luther relates numerous instances of personal 



REFORMATION GERMANY FOLKLORE loi 

encounters that he himself had had with the 
deviL A nobleman invited him, with other 
learned men from the University of Witten- 
berg, to take part in a hare hunt. A large, 
fine hare and a fox crossed the path. The 
nobleman, mounted on a strong, healthy steed, 
dashed after them, when, suddenly, his horse 
fell dead beneath him, and the fox and the 
hare flew up in the air and vanished. *' For," 
says Luther, *' they were devilish spectres." 

Again, on another occasion, he was at 
Eisleben on the occasion of another hare-hunt, 
when the nobleman succeeded in killing eight 
hares, which were, on their return home, duly 
hung up for the next day's meal. On the 
following morning, horses' heads were found 
in their place. *' In mines," says Luther, " the 
devil oftentimes deceives men with a false 
appearance of gold." AH disease and all mis- 
fortune were the direct work of the devil ; God, 
who was all good, could not produce either. 
Luther gives a long history of how he was 
called to a parish priest, who complained of the 
devil's having created a disturbance in his 
house by throwing the pots and pans about, and 
so forth, and of how he advised the priest to 
exorcise the fiend by invoking his own authority 
as a pastor of the Church. 

At the Wartburg, Luther complained of 
having been very much troubled by the Satanic 



I02 GERMAN CULTURE 

arts. When he was at work upon his trans- 
lation of the Bible, or upon his sermons, or 
engaged in his devotions, the devil was always 
making disturbances on the stairs or in the 
room. One day, after a hard spell of study, he 
lay down to sleep in his bed, when the devil 
began pelting him with hazel-nuts, a sack of 
which had been brought to him a few hours 
before by an attendant. He invoked, however, 
the name of Christ, and lay down again in bed. 
There were other more curious and more 
doubtful recipes for driving away Satan and his 
emissaries. Luther is never tired of urging 
that contemptuous treatment and rude chaff are 
among the most efficacious methods . 

There was, he relates, a poor soothsayer, to 
whom the devil came in visible form, and 
offered great wealth provided that he would 
deny Christ and never more do penance. The 
devil provided him with a crystal, by which he 
could foretell events, and thus become rich. 
This he did ; but Nemesis awaited him, for the 
devil deceived him one day, and caused him to 
denounce certain innocent persons as thieves. 
In consequence, he was thrown into prison, 
where he revealed the compact that he had 
made, and called for a confessor. The two 
chief forms in which the devil appeared were, 
according to Luther, those of a snake and a 
sheep. He further goes into the question of the 



REFORMATION GERMANY FOLKLORE 103 

population of devils in diflferent countries. On 
the top of the Pilatus at Luzern, he says, is a 
black pond, which is one of the devil's favourite 
abodes. In Luther's own country there is also 
a high mountain, the Ppltersberg, with a 
similar pond. When a stone is thrown into 
this pond, a great tempest arises, which 
often devastates the whole neighbourhood. 
He also alleges Prussia to be full of evil 
spirits ( ! !). 

Devilish changelings, Luther said, were often 
placed by Satan in the cradles of human 
children. ** Some maids he often plunges into 
the water, and keeps them with him until they 
have borne a child." These children are placed 
in the beds of mortals, and the true children 
are taken out and hurried away. ** But," he 
adds, '* such changelings are said not to live 
more than to the eighteenth or nineteenth 
year." As a practical application of this, it 
may be mentioned that Luther advised the 
drowning of a certain child of twelve years 
old, on the ground of its being a devil's change- 
ling. Somnambulism is, with Luther, the result 
of diabolical agency. *' Formerly," says he, 
** the Papists, being superstitious people, 
alleged that persons thus afflicted had not been 
properly baptized, or had been baptized by a 
drunken priest." The irony of the reference 
to superstition, considering the ** great re- 



I04 GERMAN CULTURE 

former's " own position, will not be lost 
upon the reader. 

Thus, not only is the devil the cause of 
pestilence, but he is also the immediate agent 
of nightmare and of nightsweats. At Molburg 
in Thiiringen, near Erfurt, a piper, who was 
accustomed to pipe at weddings, complained 
to his priest that the devil had threatened to 
carry him away and destroy him, on the 
ground of a practical joke played upon some 
companions, to wit, for having mixed horse- 
dung with their wine at a drinking bout. The 
priest consoled him with many passages of 
Scripture anent the devil and his ways, with the 
result that the piper expressed himself satisfied 
as regarded the welfare of his soul, but appre- 
hensive as regarded that of his body, which 
was, he asserted, hopelessly the prey of the 
devil. In consequence of this, he insisted on 
partaking of the Sacrament. The devil had 
indicated to him when he was going to be 
fetched, and v/atchers were accordingly placed 
in his room:, who sat in their armour and with 
their weapons, and read the Bible to him. 
Finally, one Saturday at midnight, a violent 
storm arose, that blew out the lights in the 
room, and hurled the luckless victim out of a 
narrow window into the street. The sound of 
fighting and of armed men was heard, but the 
piper had disappeared. The next morning he 



REFORMATION GERMANY FOLKLORE 105 

was found in a neighbouring ditch, with his 
arms stretched out in the form of a cross, dead 
and coal-black. Luther vouches for the truth 
of this story, which he alleges to have been 
told him by a parish priest of Gotha, who had 
himself heard it from the parish priest of Mol- 
burg, where the event was said to have taken 
place . 

Amongst the numerous anecdotes of a super- 
natural character told by '' Dr. Martin '' is one 
of a ** Poltergeist/' or '' Robin Goodfellow/' 
who was exorcised by two monks from the 
guest-chamber of an inn, and who offered his 
services to them in the monastery. They gave 
him a corner in the kitchen. The serving-boy 
used to torment him by throwing dirty water 
over him. After unavailing protests, the 
spirit hung the boy up to a beam, but let him 
down again before serious harm resulted. 
Luther states that this " brownie " was well 
know'n by sight in the neighbouring town (the 
name of which he does not give). But by far 
the larger number of his stories, which, be it 
observed, are warranted as ordinary occur- 
rences, as to the possibility of which there was 
no question, are coloured by that more sinister 
side of supernaturalism so much emphasised 
by the new theology. 

The mediaeval devil was, for the most part, 
himself little more than a prankish Riibezahl, 



io6 GERMAN CULTURE 

or Robin GoodfelloW' ; the new Satan of the 
Reformers was, in very deed, an arch-fiend, 
the enemy of the human race, with whom no 
truce or parley might be held. The old folk- 
lore belief in incabi and siiccubi as the parents 
of changelings is brought into connection with 
the theory of direct diabolic begettal. Thus 
Luther relates how Friedrich, the Elector of 
Saxony, told him of a noble family that had 
sprung from a sue cub us : " Just,'' says he, ** as 
the Melusina at Luxembourg was also such a 
succubus, or devil." In the case referred to, 
the succubus assumed the shape of the man's 
dead wife, and lived with him and bore him 
children, until, one day, he swore at her, when 
she vanished, leaving only her clothes behind. 
After giving it as his opinion that all such 
beings and their offspring are wiles of the devil, 
he proceeds : *' It is truly a grievous thing 
that the devil can so plague men that he 
begetteth children in their likeness. It is even 
so with the nixies in the water, that lure a 
man therin, in the shape of wife or maid, with 
whom he doth dally and begetteth offspring of 
them." The change whereby the beings of 
the old naive folklore are transformed into the 
devil or his agents is significant of that darker 
side of the new theology, which was destined 
to issue in those horrors of the witchcraft -mania 
that reached their height at the beginning of 
the following century. 



I 



REFORMATION GERMANY FOLKLORE 107 

One more story of a '* changeling " before 
we leave the subject. Luther gives us the 
following as having come to his knowledge 
near Halberstadt, in Saxony. A peasant had 
a baby, who sucked out its mother and five 
nurses, besides eating a great deal. Conclud- 
ing that it was a changeling, the peasant sought 
the advice of his neighbours, who suggested 
that he should take it on a pilgrimage to a 
neighbouring shrine of the Mother of God. 
While he was crossing a brook on the way an 
impish voice from under the water called out to 
the infant, whom he was carrying in a basket. 
The brat answered from within the basket, 
** Ho, ho I '' and the peasant was unspeakably 
shocked. When the voice from the water pro- 
ceeded to ask the child what it was after, and 
received the answer from the hitherto inarticu- 
late babe that it was going to be laid on the 
shrine of the Mother of God, to the end that 
it might prosper, the peasant could stand it no 
longer, and flung basket and baby into the 
brook. The changeling and the little devil 
played for a few moments with each other, 
rolling over and over, and crying, '* Ho, ho, 
ho ! " and then they disappeared together. 
Luther says that these devilish brats may be 
generally known by their eating and drinking 
too much, and especially by their exhausting 
their mother's milk, but they may not develop 



io8 GERMAN CULTURE 

any certain signs of their true parentage until 
eighteen or nineteen years old. The Princess 
of Anhalt had a child which Luther imagined 
to be a changeling, and he therefore advised 
its being drowned, alleging that such creatures 
were only lumps of flesh animated by the devil 
or his angels. Some one spoke of a monster 
which infested the Netherlands, and v/hich went 
about smelling at people like a dog, and 
whoever it smelt died. But those that were 
smelt did not see it, albeit the bystanders did. 
The people had recourse to vigils and masses. 
Luther improved the occasion to protest against 
the '* superstition " of masses for the dead, 
and to insist upon his favourite dogma of 
faith as the true defence against assaults of the 
devil . 

Among the numerous stories of Satanic com- 
pacts, we are told of a monk who ate up a 
load of hay, of a debtor who bit off the leg of 
his Hebrew creditor and ran off to avoid 
payment, and of a woman who bewitched her 
husband so that he vomited lizards. Luther 
observes, with especial reference to this last 
case, that lawyers and judges were fai* too 
pedantic with their witnesses and with their 
evidence ; that the devil hardens his clients 
against torture, and that the refusal to confess 
under torture ought to be of itself sufficient 
proof of dealings with the Prince of Darkness. 



REFORMATION GERMANY FOLKLORE 109 

'' Towards such/' says he, '' we would show 
no mercy; I would burn them myself." 
Black magic or witchcraft he proceeds to 
characterize as the greatest sin a human being 
can be guilty of, as, in fact, high treason 
against God Himself — crimen Icesce majestatis 
divince. 

The conversation closes with a story of how 
Maximilian's father, the Emperor Friedrich, 
who seems to have obtained a reputation for 
magic arts, invited a well-known magician to 
a banquet, and on his arrival fixed claws on his 
hands and hoofs on his feet by his cunning. 
His guest, being ashamed, tried to hide the 
claws under the table as long as he could, 
but finally he had to show them, to his great 
discomfiture. But he determined to have his 
revenge, and asked his host whether he would 
permit him to give proofs of his own skill. 
The Emperor assenting, there at once arose 
a great noise outside the window. Friedrich 
sprang up from the table, and leaned out of 
the casement to see what was the matter. 
Immediately an enormous pair of stag's horns 
appeared on his head, so that he could not 
draw it back. Finding the state of the case, 
the Emperor exclaimed : *' Rid me of them 
again ! Thou hast won ! " Luther's comment 
on this was that he was always glad to see 
one devil getting the better of another, as 



no GERMAN CULTURE 

it showed that some were stronger than 
others . 

All this belongs, roughly speaking, to the 
side of the matter which regards popular 
theology ; but there is another side which is 
connected more especially with the New 
Learning. This other school, which sought 
to bring the somewhat elastic elements of the 
magical theory of the universe into the sem- 
blance of a systematic whole, is associated with 
such names as those of Paracelsus, Cornelius 
Agrippa, and the Abbot von Trittenheim. The 
fame of the first-named was so great through- 
out Germany that when he visited any town 
the occasion was looked upon as an event of 
exceeding importance. ^ Paracelsus fully shared 
in the beliefs of his age, in spite of his brilliant 
insights on certain occasions . What his science 
was like may be imagined when we learn that 
he seriously speaks of animals who conceive 
through the mouth of basilisks whose glance 
is deadly, of petrified storks changed into 
snakes, of the stillborn young of the lion which 
are afterwards brought to life by the roar of 
their sire, of frogs falling in a shower of rain, 
of ducks transformed into frogs, and of men 
born from beasts ; the menstruation of women 
he regarded as a venom whence proceeded 

^ Cf. Sebastian Franck, Chronica^ for an account of a visit 
of Paracelsus to Niirnberg. 



REFORMATION GERMANY FOLKLORE in 

flies, spiders, earwigs, and all sorts of loath- 
some vermin ; night was caused, not by the 
absence of the sun, but by the presence of 
the stars, which were the positive cause of the 
darkness. He relates having seen a magnet 
capable of attracting the eyeball from its socket 
as far as the tip of the nose ; he knows of 
salves to close the mouth so effectually that it 
has to be broken open again by mechanical 
means, and he writes learnedly on the infal- 
lible signs of witchcraft. By mixing horse- 
dung with human semen he believed he was 
able to produce a medium from which, by 
chemical treatment in a retort, a diminutive 
human being, or homanculuSy as he called it, 
could be produced. The spirits of the elements, 
the sylphs of the air, the gnomes of the earth, 
the salamanders of the fire, and the undines 
of the water, were to him real and undoubted 
existences in Nature. 

Strange as all these beliefs seem to us now, 
they were a very real factor in the intellectual 
conceptions of the Renaissance period, no less 
than of the Middle Ages, and amidst them 
there is to be found at times a foreshadowing 
of more modern knowledge. Many other 
persons were also more or less associated with 
the magical school, amongst them Franz von 
Sickingen. Reuchlin himself, by his Hebrew 
studies, and especially by his introduction of 



112 GERMAN CULTURE 

the Kabbala to Gentile readers, also con- 
tributed a not unimportant influence in 
determining the course of the movement. The 
line between the so-called black magic, or 
operations conducted through the direct agency 
of evil spirits, and white magic, which sought 
to subject Nature to the human will by the 
discovery of her mystical and secret laws, or 
the character of the quasi -personified intelligent 
principles under whose form Nature presented 
herself to their minds, had never throughout 
the Middle Ages been very clearly defined. 
The one always had a tendency to shade ofl" 
into the other, so that even Roger Bacon's 
practices were, although not condemned, at 
least looked upon somewhat doubtfully by the 
Church. At the time of which we treat, how- 
ever, the interest in such matters had become 
universal amongst all intelligent persons. The 
scientific imagination at the close of the 
Middle Ages and during the Renaissance 
period was mainly occupied with three ques- 
tions : the discovery of the means of trans- 
muting the baser metals into gold, or otherwise 
of producing that object of universal desire ; 
to discover the Elixir Vitae, by which was 
generally understood the invention of a drug 
which v/ould have the effect of curing all 
diseases, restoring man to perennial youth, and, 
in short, prolonging human life indefinitely ; 



REFORMATION GERMANY FOLKLORE 113 

and^ finally, the search for the Philosopher's 
Stone, the happy possessor of which would 
not only be able to achieve the first two, but 
also, since it was supposed to contain the quint- 
essence of all the metals, and therefore of all 
the planetary influences to which the metals 
corresponded, would have at his command all 
the forces which mould the destinies of men. 
In especial connection with the latter object 
of research may be noted the universal in- 
terest in astrology, whose practitioners were 
to be found at every Court, from that of the 
Emperor himself to that of the most insignifi- 
cant prince or princelet, and whose advice was 
sought and carefully heeded on all important 
occasions. Alchemy and astrology were thus 
the recognized physical sciences of the age, 
under the auspices of which a Copernicus and 
a Tycho Brahe were born and educated. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN TOWN 

From what has been said the reader may form 
for himself an idea of the intellectual and 
social life of the German town of the period. 
The wealthy patrician class, whose mainstay 
politically was the Rath, gave the social tone 
to the whole. In spite of the sharp and some- 
times brutal fashion in which class distinctions 
asserted themselves then, as throughout the 
Middle Ages, there was none of that aloofness 
between class and class which characterizes the 
bourgeois society of the present day. Each 
town, were it great or small, was a little 
world in itself, so that every citizen knew 
every other citizen more or less. The schools 
attached to its ecclesiastical institutions were 
practically free of access to all the children 
whose parents could find the means to maintain 
them during their studies ; and consequently 
the intellectual differences between the different 
classes were by no means necessarily propor- 
tionate to the difference in social position. So 



SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN TOWN 115 

far as culture and material prosperity were con- 
cerned, the towns of Bavaria and Franconia, 
Munich, Augsburg, Regensburg, and perhaps, 
above all, Niirnberg, represented the high- 
water mark of mediaeval civilization as regards^ _„^ 
town life. On entering the burg, should it 
have happened to be in time of peace and 
in daylight, the stranger would clear the 
drawbridge and the portcullis without much 
challenge ; passing along streets lined with 
the houses and shops of the burghers, in 
whose open frontages the master and his 
apprentices and gesellen plied their trades, 
discussing eagerly over their work the politics 
of the town, and at this period probably the 
theological questions which were uppermost in 
men's minds, our visitor would make his way 
to some hostelry, in whose courtyard he would 
dismount from his horse, and, entering the 
common room, or Stube, with its rough but 
artistic furniture of carved oak, partake of his 
flagon of wine or beer, according to the district 
in which he was travelling, whilst the host 
cracked a rough and possibly coarse jest with 
the other guests, or narrated to them the latest 
gossip of the city. The stranger would prob- 
ably find himself before long the object of 
interrogatories respecting his native place and 
the object of his journey (although his dress 
would doubtless have given general evidence 



ii6 GERMAN CULTURE 

of this), whether he were a merchant or a 
travelhng scholar or a practiser of medicine ; 
for into one of those categories it might be 
presumed the humble but not servile traveller 
would fall. Were he on a diplomatic mission 
from some potentate he would be travelling 
at the least as a knight or a noble, with 
spurs and armour, and, moreover, would be 
little likely to lodge in a public house of 
entertainment . 

In the Stube he would probably see, drink- 
ing heavily, representatives of the ubiquitous 
Landsknechte, the mercenary troops enrolled 1 
for Imperial purposes by the Emperor 
Maximilian towards the end of the previous 
century, who in the intervals of war were dis- 
banded and wandered about spending their 
pay, and thus constituted an excessively dis- I 
integrative element in the life of the time. A ; 
contemporary writer ^ describes them as the 
curse of Germany, and stigmatizes them as 
*' unchristian, God-forsaken folk, whose hand 
is ever ready in striking, stabbing, robbing, 
burning, slaying, gaming, who delight in wine- 
bibbing, whoring, blaspheming, and in the 
making of widows and orphans." 

Presently, perhaps, a noise without indicates 
the arrival of a new guest. All hurry forth 
into the courtyard, and their curiosity is more 

\ ^ Sebastian Franck, Chronica^ ccxvii. 



SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN TOWN 117 

keenly whetted when they perceive by the 
yellow knitted scarf round the neck of the 
new-comer that he is an itinerans scholasticas^ 
or travelling scholar, who brings with him 
not only the possibility of news from the 
outer world, so important in an age when 
journals were non-existent and communica- 
tions irregular and deficient, but also a chance 
of beholding wonder-workings, as well as of 
being cured of the ailments which local skill 
had treated in vain. Already surrounded by a 
crowd of admirers waiting for the words of 
wisdom to fall from his lips, he would start 
on that exordium which bore no little re- 
semblance to the patter of the modern quack, 
albeit interlarded with many a Latin quotation 
and great display of mediaeval learning. 
'' Good people and worthy citizens of this 
town," he might say, '* behold in me the 
great master . . . prince of necromancers, 
astrologer, second mage, chiromancer, agro- 
mancer, pyromancer, hydromancer. My learn- 
ing is so profound that were all the works of 
Plato and Aristotle lost to the world I could 
from memory restore them with more elegance 
than before. The miracles of Christ were not 
so great as those which I can perform wherever 
and as often as I will. Of all alchemists I am 
the first, and my powers are such that I can 
obtain all things that man desires. My shoe- 



ii8 GERMAN CULTURE 

buckles contain more learning than the heads 
of Galen and Avicenna, and my beard has 
more experience than all your high schools. I 
am monarch of all learning. I can heal you 
of all diseases. By my secret arts I can pro- 
cure you wealth. I am the philosopher of 
philosophers. I can provide you with spells 
to bind the most potent of the devils in hell. 
I can cast your nativities and foretell all that 
shall befall you, since I have that which can 
unlock the secrets of all things that have been, 
that are, and that are to come.*' ^ Bringing 
forth strange -looking phials, covered with 
cabalistic signs, a crystal globe and an astro- 
labe, followed by an imposing scroll of 
parchment inscribed with mysterious Hebraic- 
looking characters, the travelling student would 
probably drive a roaring trade amongst the 
assembled townsmen in love-philtres, cures for 
the ague and the plague, and amulets against 
them, horoscopes, predictions of fate, and the 
rest of his stock-in-trade. 
I As evening approaches, our traveller strolls 
forth into the streets and narrow lanes of the 
town, lined with overhanging gables that 
almost meet overhead and shut out the light 
of the afternoon sun, so that twilight seems 

' Cf. Trittheim's letter to Wirdung of Hasfurt regarding 
Faust, y". Tritthemii Epistolarum Familiarum^ 153^, bk. ii, 
ep. 47 ; also the works of Paracelsus. 



SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN TOWN 119 

already to have fallen. Observing that the 
burghers, with their wives and children, the 
work of the day being done, are all wending 
toward the western gate, he goes along with 
the stream till, passing underneath the heavy 
portcullis and through the outer rampart, he 
finds himself in the plain outside, across which 
a rugged bridle-path leads to a large quad- 
rangular meadow, rough and more or less 
worn, where a considerable crowd has already 
assembled. This is the AUerwiese, or public 
pleasure-ground of the town. Here there are 
not only high festivities on Sundays and 
holidays, but every fine evening in summer 
numbers of citizens gather together to watch 
the apprentices exercising their strength in 
athletic feats, and competing with one another 
in various sports, such as running, wrestling, 
spear-throwing, sword-play, and the like, 
wherein the inferior rank sought to imitate 
and even emulate the knighthood, whilst the 
daughters of the city watched their progress 
with keen interest and applauding laughter. 
As the shadows deepen and darkness falls upon 
the plain, our visitor joins the groups which 
are now fast leaving the meadow, and re- 
passes the great embrasure just as the 
rushlights begin to twinkle in the windows and 
a swinging oil -lamp to cast a dim light here 
and there in the streets. But as his company 



120 GERMAN CULTURE 



passes out of a narrow lane debouching on 
to the chief market-place, their progress is 
stopped by the sudden rush of a mingled 
crowd of unruly apprentices and journeymen 
returning from their sports, with hot heads well 
beliquored. Then from another side-street 
there is a sudden flare of torches, borne aloft 
by guildsmen come out to quell the tumult 
and to send off the apprentices to their 
dwellings, whilst the watch also bears down 
and carries off some of the more turbulent of 
the journeymen to pass the night in one of the 
towers which guard the city wall. At last, 
however, the visitor reaches his inn by the aid 
of a friendly guildsman and his torch ; and 
retiring to his chamber, with its straw -covered 
floor, rough oaken bedstead, hard mattress, and 
coverings not much better than horse-cloths, 
he falls asleep as the bell of the minster 
tolls out ten o'clock over the now dark and 
silent city. 

Such approximately would have been the 
I view of a German city in the sixteenth century 
'as presented to a traveller in a time of peace. 
More stirring times, however, were as frequent 
—times when the tocsin rang out from the 
steeple all night long, calling the citizens to 
arms. By such scenes, needless to say, the 
year of the Peasants' War was more than usually 
characterized. In the days when every man 



1 



SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN TOWxN 121 

carried arms and knew how to use them, when 
the fighting instinct was imbibed with the 
mother's milk, when every week saw some 
street brawl, often attended by loss of life, and 
that by no means always among the most 
worthless and dissolute of the inhabitants, every 
dissatisfaction immediately turned itself into an 
armed revolt, whether it were of the appren- 
tices or the journeymen against the guild- 
masters, the body of the townsmen against the 
patriciate, the town itself against its feudal 
superior, where it had one, or of the knight- 
hood against the princes. The extremity to 
which disputes can at present be carried 
without resulting in a breach of the peace, as 
evinced in modern political and trade conflicts, 
exacerbated though some of them are, was a 
thing unknown in the Middle Ages, and 
indeed to any considerable extent until com- 
paratively recent times. The sacred right of 
insurrection was then a recognized fact of life, 
and but very little straining of a dispute led 
to a resort to arms. In the subsequent chapters 
we have to deal with the more important of 
those outbursts to which the ferment due to 
the dissolution of the mediaeval system of 
things, then beginning throughout Central 
Europe, gave rise, of which the religious side 
is represented by what is known as the 
Reformation. 



CHAPTER V 

COUNTRY AND TOWN AT THE END OF 
THE MIDDLE AGES 

For the complete understanding of the 
events which follow it must be borne in 
mind that the early sixteenth century repre- 
sents the end of a distinct historical period ; 
and, as we have pointed out in the Introduc- 
tion, the expiring effort, half-conscious and 
half-unconscious, of the people to revert to 
the conditions of an earlier age. Nor can 
the significance be properly gauged unless a 
clear conception is obtained of the differences 
between country and town life at the beginning 
of the sixteenth century. From the earliest 
periods of the Middle Ages of which we have 
any historical record, the Markgenossenschafty 
or primitive village community of the Germanic 
race, was overlaid by a territorial domination, 
imposed upon it either directly by conquest 
or voluntarily accepted for the sake of the 
protection indispensable in that rude period. 
The conflict of these two elements, the mark 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 123 

organization and the territorial lordship, con- 
stitutes the marrow of the social history of 
the Middle Ages. 

In the earliest times the pressure of the 
overlord, whoever he might be, seems to have 
been comparatively slight, but its inevitable 
tendency was for the territorial power to extend 
itself at the expense of the rural community. 
It was thus that in the tenth and eleventh 
centuries the feudal oppression had become 
thoroughly settled, and had reached its greatest 
intensity all over Europe. It continued thus 
with little intermission until the thirteenth 
century, when from various causes, economic 
and otherwise, matters began to improve in 
the interests of the common man, till in the 
fifteenth century the condition of the peasant 
was better than it has ever been, either before 
or since within historical times, in Northern 
and Western Europe. But with all this, the 
oppressive power of the lord of the soil was 
by no means dead. It was merely dormant, 
and was destined to spring into renewed activity 
the moment the lord's necessities supplied a 
sufficient incentive. From this time forward 
the element of territorial power, supported 
in its claims by the Roman law, with its basis 
of private property, continued to eat into it 
until it had finally devoured the old rights and 
possessions of the village community. The 



124 GERMAN CULTURE 

executive power always tended to be trans- 
ferred from its legitimate holder, the village 
in its corporate capacity, to the lord ; and 
this was alone sufficient to place the villager 
at his mercy. 

At the time of the Reformation, owing to 
the new conditions which had arisen and had 
brought about in a few decades the hitherto 
unparalleled rise in prices, combined with the 
unprecedented ostentation and extravagance 
more than once referred to in these pages, 
the lord was supplied with the requisite 
incentive to the exercise of the power which 
his feudal system gave him. Consequently, 
the position of the peasant rapidly changed 
for the worse ; and although at the outbreak 
of the movement not absolutely in extremis^ 
according to our notions, yet it was so bad 
comparatively to his previous condition and 
that less than half a century before, and tended 
as evidently to become more intolerable, that 
discontent became everywhere rife, and only 
awaited the torch of the new doctrines to set 
it ablaze. The whole course of the movement 
shows a peasantry, not downtrodden and 
starved but proud and robust, driven to take 
up arms not so much by misery and despair 
as by the deliberate will to maintain the 
advantages which were rapidly slipping away 
from them. 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 125 

Serfdom was not by any means universal. 
Many free peasant villages were to be found 
scattered amongst the manors of the territorial 
lords, though it was but too evidently the 
settled policy of the latter at this time to 
sweep everything into their net, and to 
compel such peasant communes to accept a 
feudal overlordship. Nor were they at all 
scrupulous in the means adopted for attaining 
their ends. The ecclesiastical foundations, as 
before said, were especially expert in forging 
documents for the purpose of proving that 
these free villages were lapsed feudatories 
of their own. Old rights of pasture were being 
curtailed, and others, notably those of hunting 
and fishing, had in most manors been com- 
pletely filched away. 

It is noticeable, however, that although the 
immediate causes of the peasant rising were 
the new burdens which had been laid upon 
the common people during the last fev/ years, 
once the spirit of discontent was aroused 
it extended also in many cases to the tradi- 
tional feudal dues to which, until then, the 
peasant had submitted with little murmuring, 
and an attempt was made by the country-side 
to reconquer the ancient complete freedom of 
which a dim remembrance had been handed 
down to them. 

The condition of the peasant up to the 



126 GERMAN CULTURE 

beginning of the sixteenth century— that is to 
say^ up to the time when it began to so rapidly 
change for the worse— may be gathered from 
what we are told by contemporary writers, such 
as Wimpfeling, Sebastian Brandt, Wittenweiler, 
the satires in the Niirnberger Fastnachtspielen, 
and numberless other sources, as also from 
the sumptuary laws of the end of the fifteenth 
century. All these indicate an ease and pro- 
fuseness of living which little accord with our 
notions of the word ** peasant." Wimpfeling 
writes : *' The peasants in our district and in 
many parts of Germany have become, through 
their riches, stiff-necked and ease-loving. I 
know peasants who at the weddings of their 
sons or daughters, or the baptism of their 
children, make so much display that a house 
and field might be bought therewith, and a 
small vineyard to boot. Through their riches, 
they are oftentimes spendthrift in food and 
in vestments, and they drink wines of price/' 
A chronicler relates of the Austrian 
peasants, under the date of 1478, that 
" they wore better garments and drank better 
wine than their lords " ; and a sumptuary law 
passed at the Reichstag held at Lindau, in 
1497, provides that the common peasant man 
and the labourer in the towns or in the field 
'' shall neither make nor wear cloth that costs 
more than half a gulden the ell, neither shall 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 12; 

they wear gold, pearls, velvet, silk, nor em- 
broidered clothes, nor shall they permit their 
wives or their children to wear such." 

Respecting the food of the peasant, it is 
stated that he ate his full in flesh of every 
kind, in fish, in bread, in fruit, drinking wine 
often to excess. The Swabian, Heinrich 
Miiller, writes in the year 1550, nearly two 
generations after the change had begun to take 
place : '* In the memory of my father, who 
was a peasant man, the peasant did eat much 
better than now. Meat and food in plenty 
was there every day, and at fairs and other 
junketings the tables did wellnigh break with 
what they bore. Then drank they wine as it 
were water, then did a man fill his belly and 
carry away withal as much as he could ; then 
was wealth and plenty. Otherwise is it now. 
A costly and a bad time hath arisen since 
many a year, and the food and drink of the 
best peasant is much worse than of yore that 
of the day labourer and the serving man." 

We may well imagine the vivid recollec- 
tions which a peasant in the year 1525 had 
of the golden days of a few years before. The 
day labourers and serving men were equally 
tantalized by the remembrance of high wages 
and cheap living at the beginning of the 
century. A day labourer could then earn, with 
his keep, nine, and without keep, sixteen 



128 GERMAN CULTURE 

groschen ^ a week. What this would buy may 
be judged from the following prices current 
in Saxony during the second half of the 
fifteenth century. A pair of good working- 
shoes cost three groschen ; a whole sheep, 
four groschen ; a good fat hen, half a 
groschen ; twenty-five cod-fish, four groschen ; 
a wagon -load of firewood, together with 
carriage, five groschen ; an ell of the best 
homespun cloth, five groschen ; a scheffel 
(about a bushel) of rye, six or seven groschen. 
The Duke of Saxony wore grey hats which 
cost him four groschen. In Northern Rhine- 
land about the same time a day labourer could, 
in addition to his keep, earn in a week a quarter 
of rye, ten pounds of pork, six large cans 
of milk, and two bundles of firewood, and in 
the course of five weeks be able to buy six 
ells of linen, a pair of shoes, and a bag for his 
tools. In Augsburg the daily wages of an 
ordinary labourer represented the value of six 
pounds of the best meat, or one pound of 
meat, seven eggs, a peck of peas, about a 
quart of wine, in addition to such bread ^as 
he required, with enough over for lodging, 
clothing, and minor expenses. In Bavaria he 
could earn daily eighteen pfennige, or one and 
a half groschen, whilst a pound of sausage 
cost one pfennig, and a pound of the best 
^ One silver groschen = i|d. 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 129 

f 
beef two pfennige, and similarly throughout 

the whole of the States of Central Europe. 

A document of the year 1483, from Ehrbach 
in the Swabian Odenwald, describes for us the 
treatment of servants by their masters. ** All 
journeymen/' it declares, *' that are hired, and 
likewise bondsmen (serfs), also the serving 
men and maids, shall each day be given twice 
meat and what thereto longith, with half a 
small measure of wine, save on fast days, when 
they shall have fish or other food that 
nourisheth. Whoso in the week hath toiled 
shall also on Sundays and feast days make 
merry after mass and preaching. They shall 
have bread and meat enough, and half a great 
measure of wine. On feast days also roasted 
meat enough. Moreover, they shall be given, 
to take home with them, a great loaf of bread 
and so much of flesh as two at one meal 
may eat." 

Again, in a bill of fare of the household 
of Count Joachim von Oettingen in Bavaria, 
the journeymen and villeins are accorded in 
the morning, soup and vegetables ; at mid- 
day, soup and meat, with vegetables, and a 
bowl of broth or a plate of salted or pickled 
meat ; at night, soup and meat, carrots, and 
preserved meat. Even the women who brought 
fowls or eggs from the neighbouring villages 
to the castle were given for their trouble— if 

9 



130 GERMAN CULTURE 

from the immediate vicinity, a plate of soup 
with two pieces of bread ; if from a greater 
distance, a complete meal and a cruse of 
wine. In Saxony, similarly, the agricultural 
journeymen received two meals a day, of four 
courses each, besides frequently cheese and 
bread at other times should they require it. 
Not to have eaten meat for a week was the 
sign of the direst famine in any district. 
Warnings are not wanting against the evils 
accruing to the common man from his 
excessive indulgence in eating and drinking. 

Such was the condition of the proletariat in 
its first inception, that is, when the mediaeval 
system of villeinage had begun to loosen and 
to allow a proportion of free labourers to in- 
sinuate themselves into its working. How 
grievous, then, were the complaints when, while 
wages had risen either not at all or at most 
from half a groschen to a groschen, the price 
of rye rose from six or seven groschen a 
bushel to about five-and-twenty groschen, that 
of a sheep from four to eighteen groschen, and 
all other articles of necessary consumption in 
a like proportion ! ^ 

In the Middle Ages, necessaries and such 
ordinary comforts as were to be had at all 
were dirt cheap ; while non -necessaries and 

^ The authorities for the above data may be found in 
Janssen, i., vol. i., bk. iii., especially pp. 330-46. 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 131 

luxuries, that is, such articles as had to be im- 
ported from afar, were for the most part at 
prohibitive prices. With the opening up of 
the world-market during the first half of the 
sixteenth century, this state of things rapidly 
changed. Most luxuries in a short time fell 
heavily in price, while necessaries rose in a 
still greater proportion. 

This latter change in the economic condi- 
tions of the world exercised its most powerful 
effect, however, on the character of the 
mediaeval town, which had remained substan- 
tially unchanged since the first great expansion 
at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning 
of the fourteenth centuries. With the exten- 
sion of commerce and the opening up of com- 
munications, there began that evolution of the 
town whose ultimate outcome was to entirely 
change the central idea on which the urban 
organization was based. 

The first requisite for a town, according to 
modern notions, is facility of communication 
with the rest of the world by means of railways, 
telegraphs, postal system, and the like. So far 
has this gone now that in a new country, for 
instance, America, the railway, telegraph lines, 
etc., are made first, and the towns are then 
strung upon them, like beads upon a cord. 
In the mediaeval town, on the contrary, com- 
munication was quite a secondary matter, and 



132 GERMAN CULTURE 

more of a luxury than a necessity. Each 
town was really a self-sufficing entity, both 
materially and intellectually. The modern idea 
of a town is that of a mere local aggregate 
of individuals, each pursuing a trade or calling 
with a view to the world -market at large. 
Their own locality or town is no more to them 
economically than any other part of the world- 
market, and very little more in any other 
respect. The mediaeval idea of a town, on 
the contrary, was that of an organization of [ 
groups into one organic whole. Just as the 
village community was a somewhat extended 
family organization, so was, mutatis mutandis, 
the larger unit, the township or city. Each 
member of the town organization owed alle- 
giance and distinct duties primarily to his 
guild, or immediate social group, and through 
this to the larger social group which con- 
stituted the civic society. Consequently, every 
townsman felt a kind of esprit de corps with 
his fellow-citizens, akin to that, say, which is 
alleged of the soldiers of the old French 
'' foreign legion," who, being brothers-in-arms, 
were brothers also in all other relations. But 
if every citizen owed duty and allegiance to 
the town in its corporate capacity, the town no 
less owed protection and assistance, in every 
department of life, to its individual members. 
^ As in ancient Rome in its earlier history, 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 133 

and as in all other early urban communities, 
agriculture necessarily played a considerable 
part in the life of most mediaeval towns. Like 
the villages, they possessed each its own mark, 
with its common fields, pastures, and woods. 
These were demarcated by various landmarks, 
crosses, holy images, etc. ; and '' the bounds " 
were beaten every year. The wealthier citi- 
zens usually possessed gardens and orchards 
within the town walls, while each inhabitant 
had his share in the communal holding without . 
The use of this latter was regulated by the 
Rath or Council. In fact, the town life of the 
Middle Ages was not by any means so sharply 
differentiated from rural life as is implied in 
our modern idea of a town. Even in the 
larger commercial towns, such as Frankfurt, 
Niirnberg, or Augsburg, it was common to 
keep cows, pigs, and sheep, and, as a matter 
of course, fowls and geese, in large numbers 
within the precincts of the town itself. In 
Frankfurt in 1481 the pigsties in the town 
had become such a nuisance that the Rath 
had to forbid them in the front of the houses 
by a formal decree. In Ulm there was a 
regulation of the bakers' guild to the effect 
that no single member should keep more than 
twenty-four pigs, and that cows should be con- 
fined to their stalls at night. In Niirnberg in 
1475 again, the Rath had to interfere with the 



134 GERMAN CULTURE 



mm 

f-rvi _ ^ 



intolerable nuisance of pigs and other farm 
yard stock running about loose in the streets. 
Even in a town like Miinchen we are informed 
that agriculture formed one of the staple occu- 
pations of the inhabitants, while in almost 
every city the gardeners' or the wine-growers' 
guild appears as one of the largest and most 
.. influential. 

It is evident that such conditions of life 
would be impossible with town-populations 
even approaching only distantly those of 
to-day ; and, in fact, when we come to inquire 
into the size and populousness of mediaeval 
German cities, as into those of the classical 
world of antiquity, we are at first sight stag- 
gered by the smallness of their proportions. 
The largest and most populous free Imperial 
cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
Niirnberg and Strassburg, numbered little more 
than 20,000 resident inhabitants within the 
walls, a population rather less than that of 
(say) many an English country town at the 
present time. Such an important place as 
Frankfurt-am-Main is stated at the middle 
of the fifteenth century to have had less 
than 9,000 inhabitants. ^ At the end of the 
fifteenth century Dresden could only boast 
of about 5; 000. Rothenburg on the 
Tauber is to-day a dead city to all intents 
and purposes, affording us a magnificent 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 135 

example of what a mediaeval town was like, 
as the bulk of its architecture, including the 
circuit of its walls, which remain intact, dates 
approximately from the sixteenth century. At 
present a single line of railway branching off 
from the main line with about two trains a 
day is amply sufficient to convey the few 
antiquaries and artists who are now its sole 
visitors, and who have to content themselves 
with country-inn accommodation. Yet this old 
free city has actually a larger population at 
the present day than it had at the time of 
which we are writing, when it was at the 
height of its prosperity as an important centre 
of activity. The figures of its population are 
now between 8,000 and 9,000. At the be- 
ginning of the sixteenth century they were 
between 6,000 and 7,000. A work written 
and circulated in manuscript during the first 
decade of the sixteenth century, '* A Chris- 
tian Exhortation " {Ein Christliche Mahnung), 
after referring to the frightful pestilences re- 
cently raging as a punishment from God, 
observes, in the spirit of true Malthusianism, 
and as a justification of the ways of Provi- 
dence, that '' an there were not so many that 
died there were too much folk in the land, and 
it were not good that such should be lest there 
were not food enough for all.'' 

Great population as constituting importance 



136 GERMAN CULTURE 



in a city is comparatively a modern notion 
In other ages towns became famous on account 
of their superior civic organization, their more 
advantageous situation, or the greater activity, 
intellectual, political, or commercial, of their 
citizens. 

What this civic organization of mediaeval 
towns was, demands a few words of explana- 
tion, since the conflict between the two main 
elements in their composition plays an im- 
portant part in the events which follow. Some- 
thing has already been said on this head in 
^^.--the Introduction. We have there pointed out 
that the Rath or Town Council, that is, the 
supreme governing body of the municipality, 
was in all cases mainly, and often entirely, 
composed of the heads of the town aristo- 
cracy, the patrician class or '' honorability '' 
{Ehrbarkeit)^ as they were termed, who on 
the ground of their antiquity and wealth laid 
claim to every post of power and privilege. 
On the other hand were the body of the 
citizens enrolled in the various guilds, seek- 
ing, as their position and wealth improved, to 
wrest the control of the town's resources from 
the patricians. It must be remembered that 
the towns stood in the position of feudal over- 
lords to the peasants who held land on the 
city territory, which often extended for many 
square miles outside the walls. A small town 



i> 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 137 

like Rothenburg, for instance, which we have 
described above, had on its lands as many as 
15,000 peasants. The feudal dues and con- 
tributions of these tenants constituted the staple 
revenue of the town, and the management of 
them was one of the chief bones of contention^ 
Nowhere was the guild system brought to^ 
a greater perfection than in the free Imperial 
towns of Germany. Indeed, it was carried 
further in them, in one respect, than in any 
other part of Europe, for the guilds of journey- 
men {Gesellenverbdnde), which in other places 
never attained any strength or importance, 
were in Germany developed to the fullest 
extent, and of course supported the craft- 
guilds in their conflict with the patriciate. 
Although there were naturally numerous 
frictions between the two classes of guilds 
respecting wages, working days, hours, and 
the like, it must not be supposed that there 
was that irreconcilable hostility between them 
which would exist at the present time between 
a trade -union and a syndicate of employers. 
Each recognized the right to existence of the 
other. In one case, that of the strike of 
bakers towards the close of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, at Colmar in Elsass, the craft-guilds 
supported the journeymen in their protest 
against a certain action of the patrician Rath, 
which they considered to be a derogation from 
their dignity. 



138 GERMAN CULTURE 

Like the masters, the journeymen had their 
own guild-house, and their own solemn func- 
tions and social gatherings . There were, 
indeed, two kinds of journeymen-guilds : one 
whose chief purpose was a religious one, and 
the other concerning itself in the first instance 
with the secular concerns of the body. How- 
ever, both classes of journeymen -guilds worked 
into one another's hand. On coming into a 
strange town a travelling member of such a 
guild was certain of a friendly reception, of 
maintenance until he procured work, and of 
assistance in finding it as soon as possible. 
Interesting details concerning the wages 
paid to journeymen and their contributions to 
the guilds are to be found in the original 
documents relating exclusively to the journey- 
men-guilds, collected by Georg Schanz.^ From 
these and other sources it is clear that the 
position of the artisan in the towns was in 
proportion much better than even that of the 
peasants at that time, and therefore immeasur- 
^ ably superior to anything he has enjoyed since. 
! In South Germany at this period the average 
•i price of beef was about two denarii 2 a pound, 

! * Zmv Geschichte der deufschen Geselknverbande. Leipzig, 
■ 1876. 

2 C. -gd. The denarius was the Soufh German equivalent 

of the North German pfennig, of which twelve went to the 

groschen. 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 139 

while the daily wages of the masons and car- 
penters, in addition to their keep and lodging, 
amounted in the summer to about twenty, and 
in the winter to about sixteen of these denarii. 
In Saxony the same journeymen -craftsmen 
earned on the average, besides their main- 
tenance, two groschen four pfennige a day, 
or about one-third the value of a bushel of 
corn. In addition to this, in some cases the 
workmen had weekly gratuities under the 
name of " batihing money " ; and in this con- 
nection it may be noticed that a holiday for 
the purpose of bathing once a fortnight, once 
a week, or even oftener, as the case might 
be, was stipulated for by the guilds, and gener- 
ally recognized as a legitimate demand. The 
common notion of the uniform uncleanliness of 
the mediaeval man requires to be considerably 
modified when one closely investigates the 
condition of town life, and finds everywhere 
facilities for bathing in winter and summer 
alike. Untidiness and uncleanliness, accord- 
ing to our notions, there may have been in the 
streets and in the dwellings in many cases, 
owing to inadequate provisions for the dis- 
posal of refuse and the like ; but we must 
not therefore extend this idea to the person, 
and imagine that the mediaeval craftsman or 
even peasant was as unwholesome as, say, the 
East European peasant of to-day. 



I40 GERMAN CULTURE 

When the wages received by the journey- 
men artisans are compared with the prices of 
commodities previously given, it will be seen 
how relatively easy were their circumstances ; 
and the extent of their well-being may be 
further judged from the wealth of their guilds, 
which, although varying in different places, at 
all times formed a considerable proportion of 
the wealth of the town. The guild system was 
based upon the notion that the individual 
master and workman was working as much in 
the interest of the guild as for his own advan- 
tage. Each member of the guild was alike 
under the obligation to labour, and to labour 
in accordance with the rules laid down by his 
guild, and at the same time had the right of 
equal enjoyment with his fellow-guildsmen of 
all advantages pertaining to the particular 
branch of industry covered by the guild. Every 
guildsman had to work himself in propria per- 
sond ; no contractor was tolerated who himself 
*' in ease and sloth doth live on the sweat of 
others, and puffeth himself up in lustful pride.'' 
Were a guild-master ill and unable to manage 
the affairs of his workshop, it was the council 
of the guild, and not himself or his relatives, 
who installed a representative for him and 
generally looked after his affairs. It was the 
guild again which procured the raw material, 
and distributed it in relatively equal propor- 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 141 

tions amongst its members ; or where this was 
not the case, the time and place were indicated 
at which the guildsman might buy at a fixed 
maximum price. Every master had equal right 
to the use of the common property and institu- 
tions of the g:uild, which in some industries 
included the essentials of production, as, for 
example, in the case of the woollen manufac- 
turers, where wool-kitchens, carding-rooms, 
bleaching -houses and the like were common to 
the whole guild. 

Needless to say, the relations between master 
and apprentices and master and journeymen 
were rigidly fixed down to the minutest detail. 
The system was thoroughly patriarchal in its 
character. In the hey-day of the guilds, every 
apprentice and most of the journeymen re- 
garded their actual condition as a period of 
preparation which would end in the glories of 
mastership. For this dear hope they Avere 
ready on occasion to undergo cheerfully the 
most arduous duties. The education in handi- 
craft, and, we may add, the supervision of the 
morals of the blossoming members of the 
guild, was a department which greatly exer- 
cised its administraltion. On the other hand, 
the guild in its corporate capacity was bound to 
maintain sick or incapacitated apprentices and 
journeymen, though after the journeymen had 
developed into a distinct class, and the conse- 



142 GERMAN CULTURE 

quent rise of the journeymen -guilds, the latter 
function was probably in most cases taken over 
by the latter. The guild laws against adultera- 
tion, scamped work, and the like, were some- 
times ferocious in their severity. For example, 
in some towns the baker who misconducted 
himself in the matter of the composition of his 
bread was condemned to be shut up in a basket ; 
which was fixed at the end of a long pole, and 
let down so many times to the bottom of a pool 
of dirty water. In the year 1456 two grocers, 
together with a female assistant, were burnt 
alive at Niirnberg for adulterating saffron and 
spices, and a similar instance happened at 
Augsburg in 1492. From what we have said 
Tt will be seen that guild life, like the life of 
the town as a whole, was essentially a social || 
life. It was a larger family, into which various 
blood families were merged. The interest of 
each was felt to be the interest of all, and 
the interest of all no less the interest of each. 

But in many towns, outside the town popula- 
tion properly speaking, outside the patrician 
families who generally governed the Rath, 
outside the guilds, outside the city organiza- 
tion altogether, there were other bodies dwell- 
ing within the walls and forming imperia in 
imperiis. These were the religious corpora- 
tions, whose possessions were often extensive, 
and who, dwelling within their own walls, shut 



il 



11 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 143 

out from the rest of the town, were subject 
only to their own ordinances. The quasi- 
religious, quasi -military Order of the Teutonic 
Knights {Deutscher Orderi), founded at the 
time of the Crusades, was the wealthiest and 
largest of these corporations. In addition 
to the extensive territories which it held 
in various parts of the empire, it had estab- 
lishments in a large number of cities. Besides 
this there were, of course, the Orders of the 
Augustinians and Carthusians, and a number 
of less important foundations, who had their 
cloisters in various towns. At the beginning"^ 
of the sixteenth century, the pomp, pride', 
and licentiousness of the Teutonic Order drew 
upon it the especial hatred of the townsfolk ; 
and amid the general wreck of religious 
houses none were more ferociously despoiled 
than those belonging to this Order. There 
were, moreover, in some towns, the establish- 
ments of princely families, which were regarded 
by the citizens with little less hostility than 
that accorded to the religious Orders. 

Such were the explosive elements of town 
life when changing conditions were tending 
to dislocate the whole structure of mediaeval 
existence. The capture of Constantinople by 
the Turks in 1453 had struck a heavy blow 
at the commerce of the Bavarian cities which 
had come by way of Constantinople and 



144 GERMAN CULTURE 

Venice. This latter city lost one by one its 
trading centres in the East, and all Oriental 
traffic by way of the Black Sea was prac- 
tically stopped. It was the Dutch cities which 
inherited the wealth and influence of the 
German towns when Vasco da Gama's dis- 
covery of the Cape route to the East began 
to have its influence on the trade of the world. 
This diversion of Oriental traffic from the old 
overland route was the starting-point of the 
modern merchant navy, and it must be placed 
amongst the most potent causes of the break-up 
of mediaeval civilization. J The above change, 
although immediately felt by the German 
towns, was not realized by them in its full 
importance either as to its causes or its conse- 
quences for more than a century ; but the 
decline of their prosperity was nevertheless 
sensible, even now, and contributed directly 
to the coming upheaval. 

The impatience of the prince, the prelate, 
the noble, and the wealthy burgher at the 
restraints which the system of the Middle 
Ages placed upon his activity as an individual 
in the acquisition for his own behoof, and the 
disposal at his own pleasure, of wealth, regard- 
less of the consequences to his neighbour, 
found expression, and a powerful lever, in 
the introduction from Italy of the Roman law 
in place of the old canon and customary law 



II 



«i 



COUNTRY AND TOWN I45 

of Europe. The latter never regarded the 
individual as an independent and autonomous 
entity, but invariably treated him with refer- 
ence to a group or social body, of which he 
might be the head or merely a subordinate 
member ; but in any case the filaments of 
custom and religious duty attached him to a 
certain humanity outside himself, whether it 
were a village community, a guild, a township, 
a province, or the empire. The idea of a right 
to individual autonomy in his dealings with 
men never entered into the mediaeval man's 
conception. Hence the mere possession of 
property was not recognized by mediaeval law 
as conferring any absolute rights in its holder 
to its unregulated use, and the basis of the 
mediaeval notions of property was the associa- 
tion of responsibility and duty with ownership. 
In other words, the notion of trust was never 
completely divorced from that of possession. 

The Roman law rested on a totally different 
basis. It represented the legal ethics of a 
society on most of its sides brutally and crassly 
individualistic. That that society had come 
to an end instead of evolving to its natural 
conclusion — a developed capitalistic indivi- 
dualism such as exists to-day— was due to 
the weakness of its economic basis, owing 
to the limitation at that time of man's power 
over Nature, which deprived it of recuperative 

lO 



146 GERMAN CULTURE 

and defensive force, thereby leaving it a 
prey not only to internal influences of decay 
but also to violent destructive forces from with- 
out. Nevertheless, it left a legacy of a 
ready-made legal system to serve as an 
implement for the first occasion when economic 
conditions should be once more ready for 
progress to resume the course of individualistic 
development, abruptly brought to an end by 
the fall of ancient civilization as crystallized 
in the Roman Empire. 

The popular courts of the village, of the 
mark, and of the town, which had existed up 
to the beginning of the sixteenth century 
with all their ancient functions, were extremely 
democratic in character. Cases were decided 
on their merits, in accordance with local 
custom, by a body of jurymen chosen from 
among the freemen of the district, to whom 
the presiding functionaries, most of whom were 
also of popular selection, were little more than 
assessors. The technicalities of a cut-and-dried 
system were unknown. The Catholic-Ger- 
manic theory of the Middle Ages proper, as 
regards the civil power in all its functions, 
from the highest downward, was that of the 
mere administrator of justice as such ; whereas 
the Roman law regarded the magistrate as the 
vicegerent of the princeps or tmperator^ in 
whose person was absolutely vested as its 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 147 

supreme embodiment the whole power of the 
State. The Divinity of the Emperors was a 
recognition of this fact ; and the influence 
of the Roman law revived the theory as 
far as possible under the changed conditions, 
in the form of the doctrine of the Divine Right 
of Kings— a doctrine which was totally alien to 
the Catholic feudal conception of the Middle 
Ages. This doctrine, moreover, received 
added force from the Oriental conception of 
the position of the ruler found in the Old 
Testament, from which Protestantism drew so 
much of its inspiration. 

But apart from this aspect of the question, 
the new juridical conception involved that of 
a system of rules as the crystallized embodi- 
ment of the abstract ** State," given through its 
representatives, which could under no circum- 
stances be departed from, and which could only 
be modified in their operation by legal quibbles 
that left to them their nominal integrity. 
The new law could therefore only be 
administered by a class of men trained 
specially for the purpose, of which the plastic 
customary law borne down the stream of 
history from primitive times, and insensibly 
adapting itself to new conditions but under- 
stood in its broader aspects by all those who 
might be called to administer it, had little need. 
The Roman law, the study of which was started 



148 GERMAN CULTURE 

at Bologna in the twelfth century, as might 
naturally be expected, early attracted the atten 
tion of the German Emperors as a suitable 
instrument for use on emergencies. But it 
made little real headway in Germany itself as 
against the early institutions until the fifteenth 
century, when the provincial power of the 
princes of the empire was beginning to over 
shadow the central authority of the titular chief 
of the Holy Roman Empire. The former, while 
strenuously resisting the results of its applica 
tion from above, found in it a powerful 
auxiliary in their Courts in riveting theirj 
power over the estates subject to them. Ai 
opposed to the delicately adjusted hierarchical' 
notions of Feudalism, which did not recog 
nize any absoluteness of dominion either over 
persons or things, in short for which meitherj 
the head of the State had any inviolate! 
authority as such, nor private property any 
inviolable rights or sanctity as such, the new 
jurisprudence made corner-stones of both these 
conceptions . 

Even the canon law, consisting in a mass 
of Papal decretals dating from the early 
Middle Ages, and which, while undoubtedly 
containing considerable traces of the influence 
of Roman law, was nevertheless largely 
customary in its character, with an infusion of 
Christian ethics, had to yield to the new. 



il 

I 



ewi 

n 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 149 

jurisprudence, and that too in countries where 
the Reformation had been unable to replace 
the old ecclesiastical dogma and organization. 
The principles and practice of the Roman law 
were sedulously inculcated by the tribe of 
civilian lawyers who by the beginning of the 
sixteenth century infested every Court through- 
out Europe. Every potentate, great and small, 
little as he might like its application by his 
feudal overlord to himself, was yet only too 
ready and willing to invoke its aid for the 
oppression of his own vassals or peasants. 
Thus the civil law everywhere triumphed. It 
became the juridical expression of the political, 
economical, and religious change which marks 
the close of the Middle Ages and the begin- 
nings of the modem commercial world. 

It must not be supposed, however, that no 
resistance was made to it. Everywhere in 
contemporary literature, side by side with de- 
nunciations of the new mercenary troops, the 
Landsknechtey we find uncomplimentary allu- 
sions to the race of advocates, notaries, and 
procurators who, as one writer has it, ** are 
increasing like grasshoppers in town and in 
country year by year." Whenever they ap- 
peared, we are told, countless litigious disputes 
sprang up. He who had but the money in 
liand might readily defraud his poorer neigh- 
bour in the name of law and right. ** Woe is 



ISO GERMAN CULTURE 

me ! " exclaims one author, ** in my home there 
is but one procurator^ and yet is the whole 
country round about brought into confusion 
by his wiles. What a misery will this horde 
bring upon us ! '' Everywhere was complaint 
and in many places resistance. 

As early as 1460 we find the Bavarian 
estates vigorously complaining that all the 
courts were in the hands of doctors. They 
demanded that the rights of the land and 
the ancient custom should not be cast aside ; 
but that the courts as of old should be served 
by reasonable and honest judges, who should 
be men of the same feudal livery and of the 
same country as those whom they tried. Again 
in I 5 1 4, when the evil had become still more 
crying, we find the estates of Wiirtemberg 
petitioning Duke Ulrich that the Supreme 
Court '* shall be composed of honourable, 
worthy, and understanding men of the nobles 
and of the towns, who shall not be doctors, 
to the intent that the ancient usages and 
customs should abide, and that it should be 
judged according to them in such wise that 
the poor man might no longer be brought 
to confusion." In many covenants of the end 
of the fifteenth century, express stipulation is 
made that they should not be interpreted . 
by a doctor or licentiate, and also in some | 
cases that no such doctor or licentiate 



J 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 151 

should be permitted to reside or to exercise 
his profession within certain districts. Great 
as was the economical influence of the new 
jurists in the tribunals, their political influence 
in the various courts of the empire, from the 
Reichskammergericht downwards, was, if any- 
thing, greater. Says Wimpfeling, the first 
writer on the art of education in the modern 
world : ** According to the loathsome doctrines 
of the new jurisconsults, the prince shall be 
everything in the land and the people naught. 
The people shall only obey, pay tax, and do 
service. Moreover, they shall not alone obey 
the prince but also them that he has placed in 
authority, who begin to puff themselves up as 
the proper lords of the land, and to order 
matters so that the princes themselves do as 
little as may be reign." From this passage 
it will be seen that the modern bureaucratic 
State, in which government is as nearly as 
possible reduced to mechanism and the per- 
sonal relation abolished, was ushered in under 
the auspices of the civil law. How easy 
it was for the civilian to effect the abolition 
of feudal institutions may be readily imagined 
by those cognizant of the principles of Roman 
law. For example, the Roman law, of course, 
making no mention of the right of the mediaeval 
*' estates " to be consulted in the levying 
of taxes or in other questions, the jurist 



152 GERMAN CULTURE 

would explain this right to his too willing 
master, the prince, as an abuse which had 
no legal justification, and which, the sooner 
it were abolished in the interest of good 
government the better it would be. All 
feudal rights as against the power of an jj 
overlord were explained away by the civil 
jurist, either as pernicious abuses, or, at best, 
as favours granted in the past by the prede- 
cessors of the reigning monarch, * which it 
was within his right to truncate or to abrogate 
at his will . 

From the preceding survey will be clearly 
perceived the important role which the new 
jurisprudence played on the Continent of 
Europe in the gestation of the new phase 
which history was entering upon in the six- 
teenth century. Even the short sketch given 
will be sufficient to show that it was not in 
one department only that it operated ; but 
that, in addition to its ow^n domain of law 
proper, its influence was felt in modifying 
economical, political, and indirectly even 
ethical and religious conditions. From this 
time forth Feudalism slowly but surely gave 
place to the newer order, all that remained 
being certain of its features, which, crystal- 
lized into bureaucratic forms, were doubly 
veneered with a last trace of mediaeval ideas 
and a denser coating of civilian conceptions. 



COUNTRY AND TOWN 153 ] 

I 

This transitional Europe, and not mediaeval 

Europe, was the Europe which lasted on until • 

the eighteenth century, and which practically ] 

came to an end with the French Revolution. j 



i^ 



CHAPTER VI 
THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 

We have already pointed out in more than 
one place the position to which the smaller 
nobility, or the knighthood, had been reduced 
by the concatenation of causes which was 
bringing about the dissolution of the old 
mediaeval order of things, and, as a con- 
sequence, ruining the knights both economic- 
ally and politically— economically by the rise 1 
of capitalism as represented by the commercial 
syndicates of the cities ; by the unprece- | 
dented power and wealth of the city confedera- 
tions, especially of the Hanseatic League ; by 
the rising importance of the newly developed 
world-market ; by the growing luxury and 
the enormous rise in the prices of commo- 
dities concurrently with the reduction in 
value of the feudal land-tenures ; and by 
the limitation of the possibilities of acquiring 
wealth by highway robbery, owing to Imperial 
constitutions, on the one hand, and increased 
powers of defence on the part of the trading 

i54 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 155 

community, on the other— politically, by the 
new modes of warfare in which artillery and 
infantry, composed of comparatively well- 
drilled mercenaries {Laridsknechte)^ were 
rapidly making inroads into the omnipo- 
tence of the ancient feudal chivalry, and 
reducing the importance of individual skill or 
prowess in the handling of weapons, and by 
the development of the power of the princes 
or higher nobility, partly due to the influence 
which the Roman civil law now began to 
exercise over the older customary Constitution 
of the empire, and partly to the budding 
centralism of authority— which in France and 
England became a national centralization, but 
in Germany, in spite of the temporary ascend- 
ancy of Charles V, finally issued in a pro- 
vincial centralization in which the princes were 
de facto independent monarchs. The Imperial 
Constitution of 1495, forbidding private war, 
applied, it must be remembered, only to the 
lesser nobility and not to the higher, thereby 
placing the former in a decidedly ignominious 
position as regards their feudal superiors. 
And though this particular enactment had 
little immediate result, yet it was none the less 
resented as a blow struck at the old knightly 
privilege. 

The mental attitude of the knighthood in 
the face of this progressing change in their 



156 GERMAN CULTURE 

position was naturally an ambiguous one, com- 
posed partly of a desire to hark back to the 
haughty independence of feudalism, and partly 
of sympathy with the growing discontent among 
other classes and with the new spirit generally. 
In order that the knights might succeed in 
recovering their old or even in maintaining 
their actual position against the higher nobility, 
the princes, backed as these now largely were 
by the Imperial power, the co-operation of 
the cities was absolutely essential to them, but 
the obstacles in the way of such a co-opera- 
tion proved insurmountable. The towns hated 
the knights for their lawless practices, which 
rendered trade unsafe and not infrequently cost 
the lives of the citizens. The knights for the 
most part, with true feudal hauteur, scorned 
and despised the artisans and traders who 
had no territorial family name and were un- 
exercised in the higher chivalric arts. The 
grievances of the two parties were, moreover, 
not identical, although they had their origin in 
the same causes. 

The cities were in the main solely con- 
cerned to maintain their old independent 
position, and especially to curb the growing 
disposition at this time of the other estates 
to use them as milch cows from which 
to draw the taxation necessary to the main- 
tenance of the empire. For example, at the 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 157 

Reichstag opened at Niirnberg on Novem- 
ber 17, 15 22 — to discuss the questions of the 
estabhshment of perpetual peace within the 
empire, of organizing an energetic resistance 
to the inroads of the Turks, and of placing 
on a firm foundation the Imperial Privy 
Council {Kctmmergericht) and the Supreme 
Council ( Reichsregiment)—2iX. which were 
represented twenty-six Imperial towns, thirty- 
eight high prelates, eighteen princes, and 
twenty -nine counts and barons— the representa- 
tives of the cities complained grievously that 
their attendance was reduced to a farce, since 
they were always out-voted, and hence obliged 
to accept the decisions of the other estates. 
They stated that their position was no longer 
bearable, and for the first time drew up an 
Act of Protest, which further complained of 
the delay in the decisions of the Imperial 
courts ; of their sufferings from the right of 
private war, which was still allowed to sub- 
sist in defiance of the Constitution ; of the 
increase of customs -stations on the part of the 
princes and prince -prelates ; and, finally, of 
the debasement of the coinage due to the un- 
scrupulous practices of these notables and of 
the Jews. The only sympathy the other estates 
vouchsafed to the plaints of the cities was 
with regard to the right of private war, which 
the higher nobles were also anxious to sup- 



IS8 GERMAN CULTURE 

press amongst the lower, though without 
prejudice, of course, to their own privileges 
in this line. All the other articles of the Act 
of Protest were coolly waived aside. From 
all this it will be seen that not much co- 
operation was to be expected between such 
heterogeneous bodies as the knighthood and 
the free towns, in spite of their common 
interest in checking the threateningly ad- 
vancing power of the princes and the central 
Imperial authority in so far as it was manned 
and manipulated by the princes. 

Amid the decaying knighthood there was, 
as we have already intimated, one figure 
which stood out head and shoulders above 
every other noble of the time, whether prince 
or knight, and that was Franz von Sickingen. 
He has been termed, not without truth, 
** the last flower of German chivalry," since 
in him the old knightly qualities flashed up 
in conjunction with the old knightly power 
and splendour with a brightness hardly known 
even in the palmiest days of mediaeval life. 
It was, however, the last flicker of the light 
of German chivalry. With the death of 
Sickingen and the collapse of his revolt the 
knighthood of Central Europe ceased any 
longer to play an independent part in history. 

Sickingen, although technically only one of | 
the lower nobility, was deemed about the 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 159 

time of Luther's appearance to hold the 
immediate destinies of the empire in his hand. 
Wealthy, inspiring confidence and enthusiasm 
as a leader, possessed of more than one power- 
ful and strategically situated stronghold, he 
held court at his favourite residence, the Castle 
of the Landstuhl, in the Rhenish Palatinate, 
in a style which many a prince of the 
empire might have envied. As honoured 
guests were to be found attending on him 
humanists, poets, minstrels, partisans of the 
new theology, astrologers, alchemists, and men 
of letters generally— in short, the whole intel- 
ligence and culture of the period. Foremost 
amongst these, and chief confidant of Sickin- 
gen, was the knight, courtier, poet, essayist, 
and pamphleteer, Ulrich von Hutten, whose 
pen was ever ready to champion with unstinted 
enthusiasm the cause of the progressive ideas 
of his age. He first took up the cudgels 
against the obscurantists on behalf of 
Humanism as represented by Erasmus and 
Reuchlin, the latter of whom he bravely 
defended in his dispute with the Inquisition 
and the monks of Cologne, and in his con- 
tributions to the Epistolce Obscarorum Virorum 
we see the youthful ardour of the Renaissance 
in full blast in its onslaught on the forces of 
medieval obstruction. Unlike most of those 
with whom he was first associated, Hutten 



i6o GERMAN CULTURE 



passed from being the upholder of the New 
Learning to the role of champion of the Refor- 
mation ; and it was largely through his influ 
ence that Sickingen took up the cause ofj 
Luther and his movement. 

Sickingen had been induced by Charles V 
to assist him in an abortive attempt to 
invade France in 1521, from which campaign 
he had returned without much benefit either 
material or morale save that Charles was left 
heavily in his debt. The accumulated hatred 
of generations for the priesthood had made 
Sickingen a willing instrument in the hands 
of the reforming party, and believing that 
Charles now lay to some extent in his power, 
he considered the moment opportune for 
putting his long-cherished scheme into opera- 
tion for reforming the Constitution of the 
empire. This reformation consisted, as was 
to be expected, in placing his own order on 
a firm footing, and of effectually curbing the 
power of the other estates, especially that of 
the prelates. Sickingen wished to make the 
Emperor and the lower nobility the decisive 
factors in his new scheme of things political. 
The Emperor, it so happened, was for the 
moment away in Spain, and Sickingen's col- 
leagues of the knightly order were becoming 
clamorous at the unworthy position into which 
they found themselves rapidly being driven. 



I 



i 



Ai 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD i6i 

The feudal exactions of their princely lieges 
had reached a point which passed all 
endurance, and since they were practically 
powerless in the Reichstags, no outlet was left 
for their discontent save by open revolt. Im- 
pelled not less by his own inclinations than 
by the pressure of his companions, foremost 
among whom was Hutten, Sickingen decided 
at once to open the campaign. 

Hutten, it would appear, attempted to enter 
into negotiations for the co-operation of the 
towns and of the peasants. So far as can 
be seen, Strassburg and one or two other 
Imperial cities returned favourable answers ; 
but the precise measure of Hutten's success 
cannot be ascertained, owing to the fact that 
all the documents relating to the matter 
perished in the destruction . of Sickingen's 
Castle of Ebernburg. 

It should be premised that on August 

13th, previous to this declaration of war, a 

** Brotherly Convention " had been signed by 

a number of the knights, by which Sickingen 

was appointed their captain, and they bound 

themselves to submit to no jurisdiction save 

I their own, and pledged themselves to mutual 

aid in war in case of hostilities against any 

I one of their number. Through this '' Treaty 

of Landau,'' Sickingen had it in his power 

I to assemble a considerable force at a 

II 



i62 GERMAN CULTURE 

moment's notice. Consequently, a few days 
after the issue of the above manifesto, on 
August 27, 1522, Sickingen was able to start 
from the Castle of Ebernburg with an army 
of 5,000 foot and 1,500 knights, besides 
artillery, in the full confidence that he was 
about to destroy the position of the Palatine 
prince -prelate and raise himself without delay 
to the chief power on the Rhine. 

By an effective piece of audacity, that of 
sporting the Imperial flag and the Burgundian 
cross, Franz spread abroad the idea that he 
was acting on behalf of the Emperor, then 
absent in Spain ; and this largely contributed 
to the result that his army speedily rose 
to 5,000 knights and 10,000 footmen. The 
Imperial Diet at Niirnberg now intervened, 
and ordered Sickingen to cease the opera- 
tions he had already begun, threatening him 
with the ban of the empire and a fine of 
2,000 marks if he did not obey. To this 
summons Franz sent a characteristically impu- 
dent reply, and light-heartedly continued the 
campaign, regardless of the warning which an 
astrologer had given him some time previously, 
that the year 1522 or 1523 would probably 
be fatal to him. It is evident that this cam- 
paign, begun so late in the year, was regarded 
by Sickingen and the other leaders as merely 
a preliminary canter to a larger and more wide- 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 163 

spread movement the following spring, since 
on this occasion the Swabian and Franconian 
knighthood do not appear to have been even 
invited to take part in it. 

After an easy progress, during which several 
trifling places, the most important being 
St. Wendel, were taken, Franz with his army 
arrived on September 8th before the gates of 
Trier. He had hoped to capture the town 
by surprise, and was indeed not without some 
expectation of co-operation and help from the 
citizens themselves. On his arrival he shot 
letters within the walls summoning the in- 
habitants to take his part against their tyrant ; 
but either through the unwillingness of the 
burghers to act with knights, or through the 
vigilance of the Archbishop, they were with- 
out effect. The gates remained closed ; and 
in answer to Sickingen's summons to surrender, 
Richard replied that he would find him in the 
city if he could get inside. In the meantime 
Sickingen's friends had signally failed in their 
attempts to obtain supplies and reinforcements 
for him, in the main owing to the energetic 
action of some of the higher nobles. The 
Archbishop of Trier showed himself as much 
a soldier as a Churchman ; and after a week's 
siege, during which Sickingen made five 
assaults on the city, his powder ran out, 
and he was forced to retire. He at once made 



i64 GERMAN CULTURE 

his way back to Ebernburg, where he intended 
to pass the winter, since he saw that it was 
useless to continue the campaign, with his own | 
army diminishing and the hoped-for supphes • 
not appearing, whilst the forces of his 
antagonists augmented daily. In his strong- 
hold of Ebernburg he could rely on being 
secure from all attack until he was able to 
again take the field on the offensive, as he 
anticipated doing in the spring. 

In spite of the obvious failure of the 
autumnal campaign, the cause of the knight- 
hood did not by any means look irretrievably 
desperate, since there was always the possibility 
of successful recruitments the following spring. 
Ulrich von Hutten was doing his utmost in 
Wiirtemberg and Switzerland to scrape together 
men and money, though up to this time with- 
out much success, while other emissaries of 
Sickingen were working with the same object 
in Breisgau and other parts of Southern 
Germany. Relying on these expected reinforce- 
ments, Franz was confident of victory when 
he should again take the field, and in the 
meantime he felt himself quite secure in one I 
or other of his strong places, which had 
recently undergone extensive repairs and 
seemed to be impregnable. In this antici- 
pation he was deceived, for he had not 
reckoned with the new and more potent 



I 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 165 

weapons of attack which were replacing the 
battering-ram and other mediaeval besieging 
appliances. Franz retired to his strong castle 
of the Landstuhl to await the onslaught of 
the princes which followed in the spring. After 
heavy bombardment Sickingen was mortally 
wounded on May 6th, and the place was imme- 
diately surrendered. The next day the princes 
entered the castle, where, in an underground 
chamber, their enemy lay dying. 

He was so near his end that he could 
scarcely distinguish his three arch-enemies one 
from the other. '' My dear lord," he said to 
the Count Palatine, his feudal superior, " I had 
not thought that I should end thus," taking 
off his cap and giving him his hand. *' What 
has impelled thee, Franz," asked the Arch- 
bishop of Trier, " that thou hast so laid waste 
and harmed me and my poor people? " " Of 
that it were too long to speak," answered 
Sickingen, '' but I have done nought without 
cause. I go now to stand before a greater 
Lord." Here it is worthy of remark that the 
princes treated Franz with all the knightliness 
and courtesy which were customary between 
social equals in the days of chivalry, address- 
ing him at most rather as a rebellious child 
than as an insurgent subject. The Prince of 
Hesse was about to give utterance to a 
reproach, but he was interrupted by the Count 



i66 GERMAN CULTURE 

Palatine, who told him that he must not quarrel 
with a dying man. The Count's chamberlain 
said some sympathetic words to Franz, who 
replied to him : " My dear chamberlain, it 
matters little about me. It is not I who am 
the cock round which they are dancing." 
When the princes had withdrawn, his chap- 
lain asked him if he would confess ; but Franz 
replied : ''I have confessed to God in my 
heart," whereupon the chaplain gave him 
absolution ; and as he went to fetch the host 
'' the last of the knights " passed quietly 
away, alone and abandoned. It is related by 
Spalatin that after his death some peasants 
and domestics placed his body in an old 
armour-chest, in which they had to double the 
head on to the knees. The chest was then 
let down by a rope from the rocky eminence 
on which stands the now ruined castle, and 
was buried beneath a small chapel in the 
village below. 

The scene we have just described in the 
castle vault meant not merely the tragedy of 
a hero's death, nor merely the destruction of 
a faction or party, it meant the end of an 
epoch. With Sickingen's death one of the 
most salient and picturesque elements in the 
mediaeval life of Central Europe received its 
death-blow. The knighthood as a distinct 
factor in the polity of Europe henceforth 
existed no more. 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 167 

Spalatin relates that on the death of Sickin- 
gen the princely party anticipated as easy a 
victory over the religious revolt as they had 
achieved over the knighthood. *' The mock 
Emperor is dead/' so the phrase went, " and 
the mock Pope will soon be dead also." 
Hutten, already an exile in Switzerland, did 
not many months survive his patron and leader, 
Sickingen. The role which Erasmus played 
in this miserable tragedy was only what was 
to be expected from the moral cowardice which 
seemed ingrained in the character of the great 
Humanist leader. Erasmus had already begun 
to fight shy of the Reformation movement, 
from which he was about to separate himself 
definitely. He seized the present opportunity 
to quarrel with Hutten ; and to Hutten's some- 
what bitter attacks on him in consequence he 
replied with ferocity in his Spongia Erasmi 
adversas aspergines Hutteni, 

Hutten had had to fly from Basel to 
Miilhausen and thence to Zurich, in the last 
stages of syphilitic disease. He was kindly 
received by the reformer, Zwingli of Zurich, 
who advised him to try the waters of Pfeffers, 
and gave him letters of recommendation to 
the abbot of that place. He returned, in 
no wise benefited, to Zurich, when Zwingli 
again befriended the sick knight, and sent him 
to a friend of his, the *' reformed " pastor of the 



i68 GERMAN CULTURE 

little island of *' Ufenau/' at the other end of 
the lake, where after a few weeks' suffering 
he died in abject destitution, leaving, it is said, 
nothing behind him but his pen. The disease 
from which Hutten suffered the greater part 
of his life, at that time a comparatively new 
importation and much more formidable even 
than nowadays, may well have contributed to 
an irascibility of temper and to a certain reck- 
lessness which the typical free-lance of the 
Reformation in its early period exhibited. 
Hutten was never a theologian, and the 
Reformation seems to have attracted him 
mainly from its political side as implying the 
assertion of the dawning feeling of German 
nationality as against the hated enemies of 
freedom of thought and the new light, the 
clerical satellites of the Roman see. He was 
a true son of his time, in his vices no less 
than in his virtues ; and no one will deny 
his partiality for '* wine, women, and play." 
There is reason, indeed, to believe that the 
latter at times during his later career provided 
his sole means of subsistence. 

The hero of the Reformation, Luther, with 
whom Melanchthon may be associated in this 
matter, could be no less pusillanimous on 
occasion than the hero of the New Learning, 
Erasmus. Luther undoubtedly saw in Sickin- 
gen's revolt a means of weakening the Catholic 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 169 

1 

powers against which he had to fight, and at 

its inception he avowedly favoured the enter- 
prise. In some of the reforming writings 
Luther is represented as the incarnation of 
Christian resignation and mildness, and as 
talking of twelve legions of angels and de- 
precating any appeal to force as unbefitting 
the character of an evangelical apostle. That 
such, however, was not his habitual attitude is 
evident to all who are in the least degree 
acquainted with his real conduct and utter- 
ances. On one occasion he wrote : '' If they 
(the priests) continue their mad ravings it 
seems to me that there would be no better 
method and medicine to stay them than that 
kings and princes did so with force, armed 
themselves and attacked these pernicious 
people who do poison all the world, and 
once for all did make an end of their doings 
with weapons, not with words. For even as 
we punish thieves with the sword, murderers 
with the rope, and heretics with fire, wherefore 
do we not lay hands on these pernicious 
teachers of damnation, on popes, on cardinals, 
bishops, and the swarm of the Roman Sodom 
— yea, with every weapon which lieth within 
our reach, and wherefore do we not wash our 
hands in their blood? " ^ 

It is, however, in a manifesto published in 
' Italics the present author's. 



I70 GERMAN CULTURE ' 

July 1522, just before Sickingen's attack on 
the Archbishop of Trier, for which enterprise 
it was doubtless intended as a justification, 
that Luther expresses himself in unmeasured 
terms against the '' biggest wolves," the 
bishops, and calls upon " all dear children 
of God and all true Christians " to drive them 
out by force from the *' sheep -stalls." In this 
pamphlet, entitled Against the falsely called 
spiritual order of the Pope and the Bishops, 
he says : " It were better that every bishop 
were murdered, every foundation or cloister 
rooted out, than that one soul should be 
destroyed, let alone that all souls should be 
lost for the sake of their worthless trumpery | 
and idolatry. Of what use are they who thus i 
live in lust, nourished by the sweat and labour 
of others, and are a stumbling-block to the 
word of God? They fear bodily uproar and ' 
despise spiritual destruction. Are they wise \ 
and honest people? If they accepted God's j 
word and sought the life of the soul, God ; 
would be with them, for He is a God of peace, , 
and they need fear no uprising ; but if they . 
will not hear God's word, but rage and rave 1 
with bannings, burnings, killings, and every i 
evil, what do they better deserve than a strong ; 
uprising which shall sweep them from the | 
earth? And we would smile did it happen.^ J 

' Italics the present author's. ; 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 171 

As the heavenly wisdom saith : * Ye have 
hated my chastisement and despised my 
doctrine ; behold, I will also laugh at ye 
in your distress, and will mock ye when mis- 
fortune shall fall upon your heads.' " In the 
same document he denounces the bishops as 
an accursed race, as '' thieves, robbers, and 
usurers." Swine, horses, stones, and wood 
were not so destitute of understanding as the 
German people under the sway of them and 
their Pope. The religious houses are similarly 
described as '* brothels, low taverns, and 
murder dens." He winds up this document, 
which he calls his '' bull," by proclaiming that 
*' all who contribute body, goods, and honour 
that the rule of the bishops may be destroyed 
are God's dear children and true Christians, 
obeying God's command and fighting against 
the devil's order " ; and, on the other hand, 
that '' all who give the bishops a willing 
obedience are the devil's own servants, and 
fight against God's order and law." ^ 

No sooner, however, did things begin to 
look bad with Sickingen than Luther promptly 
sought to disengage himself from all complicity 
or even sympathy with him and his losing 
cause. So early as December 19, 1522, he 
writes to his friend Wenzel Link : ** Franz von 
Sickingen has begun war against the Palatine. 

' Sdmmtliche^Werkey vol. xxviii. pp. 142-201. 



1/2 GERMAN CULTURE 

It will be a very bad business." {Franciscus 
Sickingen Palatino helium indixit, res pessima 
futura est,) His colleague, Melanchthon, a 
few days later, hastened to deprecate the 
insinuation that Luther had had any part or 
lot in initiating the revolt. " Franz von Sickin- 
gen/' he wrote, '' by his great ill-will injures 
the cause of Luther ; and notwithstanding that 
he be entirely dissevered from him, neverthe- 
less whenever he undertaketh war he wisheth 
to seem to act for the public benefit, and not 
for his own. He doth even now pursue a most 
infamous course of plunder on the Rhine." 
In another letter he says : '' I know how this 
tumult grieveth him (Luther)," ^ and this 
respecting the man who had shortly before 
written of the princes that their tyranny and 
haughtiness were no longer to be borne, 
alleging that God would not longer endure 
it, and that the common man even w^as 
becoming intelligent enough to deal with 
them by force if they did not mend their 
manners. A more telling example of the 
*' don't-put-him-in-the -horse -pond " attitude 
could scarcely be desired. That it was 
characteristic of the " great reformer " will be 
seen later on when we find him pursuing a 
similar policy anent the revolt of the peasants. 
After the fall of the Landstuhl all Sickin- 

* Corpus Reformatorum, vol. i. pp. 598-9. 



THE REVOLT OF THE KNIGHTHOOD 173 

gen's castles and most of those of his immediate 
alhes and friends were of course taken, 
and the greater part of them destroyed. 
The knighthood was now to all intents and 
purposes politically helpless and economically 
at the door of bankruptcy, owing to the sud- 
denly changed conditions of which we have 
spoken in the Introduction and elsewhere as 
supervening since the beginning of the century : 
the unparalleled rise in prices, concurrently 
with the growing extravagance, the decline of 
agriculture in many places, and the increasing 
burdens put upon the knights by their feudal 
superiors, and last, but not least, the increasing 
obstacles in the way of the successful pursuit 
of the profession of highway robbery. The 
majority of them, therefore, clung with relent- 
less severity to the feudal dues of the 
peasants, which now constituted their main, 
and in many cases their only, source of 
revenue ; and hence, abandoning the hope of 
independence, they threw in their lot with the 
authorities, the princes, lay and ecclesiastic, 
in the common object of both, that of reducing 
the insurgent peasants to complete subjection. 



CHAPTER VII 

GENERAL SIGNS OF RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL 

REVOLT 

Peasant revolts of a sporadic character are to 
be met with throughout the Middle Ages even 
in their halcyon days. Some of these, like the 
Jacquerie in France and the revolt associated 
with the name of Wat Tyler in England, were 
of a serious and more or less extended 
character. But most of them were purely local 
and of no significance, apart from temporary 
and passing circumstances. By the last 
quarter of the fifteenth century, however, 
peasant risings had become increasingly 
numerous and their avowed aims much more 
definite and far-reaching than, as a rule, were 
those of an earlier date. In saying this we 
are referring to those revolts which were 
directly initiated by the peasantry, the serfs, 
and the villeins of the time, and which had as 
their main object the direct amelioration of the 
peasant's lot. Movements of a primarily 
religious character were, of course, of a some- 

174 



RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 175 

what different nature, but the tendency was in- 
creasingly, as we approach the period of the 
Reformation, for the two currents to merge one 
in the other. The echoes of the Hussite move- 
ment in Bavaria at the beginning of the century 
spread far and wide throughout Central 
Europe, and had by no means spent their force 
as the century drew towards its close. 

From this time forward recurrent indica- 
tions of social revolt with a strong religious 
colouring, or a religious revolt with a 
strong social colouring, became chronic in 
the Germanic lands and those adjacent 
thereto. As an example may be taken 
the movement of Hans Boheim, of Niklas- 
hausen, in the diocese of Wiirzburg, in 
Franconia, in 1476, and which is regarded by 
some historians as the first of the movements 
leading directly up to those of the Lutheran 
Reformation. Hans claimed a divine mission 
for preaching the gospel to the common man. 
Hans preached asceticism and claimed Nik- 
lashausen as a place of pilgrimage for a new 
worship of the Virgin. There was little in this 
to alarm the authorities till Hans announced 
that the Queen of Heaven had revealed to him 
that there was to be no lay or spiritual 
authority, but that all men should be brothers, 
earning their bread by the sweat of their brows, 
paying no more imposts or dues, holding land 



176 GERMAN CULTURE 

in common, and sharing alike in all things. 
The movement went on for some months, 
spreading rapidly in the neighbouring terri- 
tories. At last Hans was seized by armed 
men while asleep and hurried to Wurzburg. 
The affair caused immense commotion, and 
by the Sunday following, it is stated, 34,000 
armed peasants assembled at Niklashausen . 
Led by a decayed knight and his son, 
16,000 of them marched to Wiirzburg, 
demanding their prophet at the gate of the 
bishop's castle. By promises and cajolery, 
they were induced to disperse by the prince - 
bishop, who, as soon as he saw they were return- 
ing home in straggling parties, treacherously 
sent a body of his knights after them, killing 
some and taking others prisoners. Two of 
the ringleaders were beheaded outside the 
castle, and at the same time the prophet Hans 
Boheim was burnt to ashes. Thus ended a 
typical religio -social peasant revolt ' of the 
half-century preceding the great Reformation 
movement . 

In 1 49 1 the oppressed and plundered vil- 
leins of Kempten revolted, but the movement 
was quelled by the Emperor himself after a 
compromise. A great rising took place in 
Elsass (Alsace) in 1493 among the feudatories 
of the Bishop of Strassburg, with the usual 
object of freedom for the '' common man,'' 



RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 177 

abolition of feudal exactions, Church reforma- 
tion, etc. This movement is interesting, as 
having first received the name of the 
Bundschuh, It was decided that as the knight 
was distinguished by his spurs, so the peasant 
should have as his device the common shoe of 
his class, laced from the ankle through to the 
knee by leathern thongs, and the banner 
whereon this emblem was depicted was accord- 
ingly made. The movement was, however, be- 
trayed and mercilessly crushed by the neigh- 
bouring knighthood. A few years later a 
similar movement, also having the Bundschah 
for its device, took place in the regions of the 
Upper and Middle Rhine. This movement 
created a panic among all the privileged 
classes, from the Emperor down to the knight. 
The situation was discussed in no less than 
three separate assemblies of the States, It 
was, however, eventually suppressed for the 
time being. A few years later, in i 5 1 2, it again 
burst forth under the leadership of an active 
adherent of the former movement, one Joss 
Fritz, in Baden, at the village of Lehen, near 
the town of Freiburg. The organization in 
this case, besides being widespread, was ex- 
ceedingly good, and the movement was nearly 
successful when at the last moment it was 
betrayed. Even in Switzerland there were 
peasant risings in the early years of the six- 

12 



1 



178 GERMAN CULTURE 



I 



teenth century. About the same time thi 
duchy of Wlirtemberg was convulsed by 
movement which took the name of the " Poo 
Conrad." Its object was the freeing of the 
*' common man " from feudal services and dues 
and the abolition of seignorial rights over the 
land^ etc. But here again the movement was 
suppressed by Duke Ulrich and his knights 
Another rising took place in Baden in i 5 1 7 . 
Three years previously, in i 5 1 4, occurred the 
great Hungarian peasant rebellion under 
George Daze. Under the able leadership of 
the latter the peasants had some not incon- 
siderable initial successes, but this movement 
also, after some weeks, was cruelly suppressed. 
About the same time, too, occurred various 
insurrectionary peasant movements in the 
Styrian and Carinthian alpine districts. Similar 
movements to those referred to were also going 
on during those early years of the fifteenth 
century in other parts of Europe, but these, 
of course, do not concern us. 

The deep -reaching importance and effective 
spread of such movements was infinitely 
greater in the Middle Ages than in modern 
times. The same phenomenon presents itself 
to-day in backward and semi-barbaric com- 
munities. At first sight one is inclined to think 
that there has been no period in the world's 
history when it was so easy to stir up a 



l! 



RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL REVOLT 179 

population as the present, with our newspapers, 
our telegraphs, our aeroplanes, our postal 
arrangements, and our railways. But this is 
just one of those superficial notions that are not 
confirmed by history. We are similarly apt to 
think that there was no age in which travel was 
so widespread and formed so great a part of 
the education of mankind as at present. There 
could be no greater mistake. The true age of 
travelling was the close of the Middle Ages, or 
what is known as the Renaissance period. The 
man of learning, then just differentiated from 
the ecclesiastic, spent the greater part of his 
life in carrying his intellectual wares from Court 
to Court and from University to University, 
just as the merchant personally carried his 
goods from city to city in an age in which 
commercial correspondence, bill-brokers, and 
the varied forms of modern business were but 
in embryo. It was then that travel really meant 
education, the acquirement of thorough and 
intimate knowledge of diverse manners and 
customs. Travel was then not a pastime, but 
a serious element in life. 

In the same way the spread of a political 
or social movement was at least as rapid then 
as now, and far more penetrating. The 
methods were, of course, vastly different from 
the present ; but the human material to be 
dealt with was far easier to mould, and kept 



i8o GERMAN CULTURE 

its shape much more readily when moulded, 
than is the case nowadays. The appearance 
of a religious or political teacher in a village 
or small town of the Middle Ages was an event 
which keenly excited the interest of the 
inhabitants. It struck across the path of their 
daily life, leaving behind it a track hardly 
conceivable to-day. For one of the salient 
symptoms of the change which has taken 
place since that time is the disappearance of 
local centres of activity and the transference 
of the intensity of life to a few large towns. 
In the Middle Ages every town, small no less 
than large, was a more or less self-sufficing 
organism, intellectually and industrially, and 
was not essentially dependent on the outside 
world for its social sustenance. This was 
especially the case in Central Europe, where 
communication was much more imperfect and 
dangerous than in Italy, France, or England. 
In a society without newspapers, without easy 
communication with the rest of the world, where 
the vast majority could neither read nor write, 
where books were rare and costly, and acces- 
sible only to the privileged few, a new idea \ 
bursting upon one of these communities was 
eagerly welcomed, discussed in the council 
chamber of the town, in the hall of the castle, 
in the refectory of the monastery, at the social 
board of the burgess, in the workroom, and, 



RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL REVOLT i8i 

did it but touch his interests, in the hut of the 
peasant. It was canvassed, too, at church fes- 
tivals {Kirchweihe), the only regular occasion 
on which the inhabitants of various localities 
came together. In the absence of all other 
distraction, men thought it out in all the bear- 
ings which their limited intellectual horizon 
permitted. If calculated in any way to appeal 
to them it soon struck root, and became a part 
of their very nature, a matter for which, if 
occasion were, they were prepared to sacrifice 
goods, liberty, and even life itself. In the 
present day a new idea is comparatively slow 
in taking root. Amid the myriad distractions 
of modern life, perpetually chasing one another, 
there is no time for any one thought, how- 
ever wide -reaching in its bearings, to take a 
firm hold. In order that it should do so in 
the modern mind^ it must be again and again 
borne in upon this not always too receptive 
intellectual substance. People require to read 
of it day after day in their newspapers, or to 
hear it preached from countless platforms, 
before any serious effect is created. In the 
simple life of former ages it was not so. 

The mode of transmitting intelligence, espe- 
cially such as was connected with the stirring 
up of political and religious movements, was 
in those days of a nature of which we have 
now little conception. The sort of thing in 



i82 GERMAN CULTURE 



^ 



vogue then may be compared to the methods 
adopted in India to prepare the Mutiny of 
1857, when the mysterious cake was passed 
from village to village, signifying that the 
moment had come for the outbreak. The sense 
of esprit de corps and of that kind of honour 
most intimately associated with it, it must also 
be remembered, was infinitely keener in ruder 
states of society than under a high civiliza- 
tion. The growth of civilization, as imply- 
ing the disruption of the groups in which the 
individual is merged under more primitive con- 
ditions, and his isolation as an autonomous unit 
having vague and very elastic moral duties to 
his *' country " or to mankind at large, but none 
towards any definite and proximate social 
whole, necessarily destroys that communal 
spirit which prevails in the former case. This 
is one of the striking truths which the history of 
these peasant risings illustrates in various ways 
and brings vividly home to us. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS AND 
THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT ^ 

The year following the collapse of Franz 
Sickingen's rebellion saw the first mutterings 
of the great movement known as the Peasants' 
War, the most extensive and important of all 
the popular insurrections of the Middle Ages, 
which, as we have seen in a previous chapter, 
had been led up to during the previous half- 
century by numerous sporadic movements 
throughout Central Europe having like aims. 
The first actual outbreak of the Peasants' 
War took place in August 1524, in the Black 
Forest, in the village of Stiihlingen, from an 
apparently trivial cause. It spread rapidly 
throughout the surrounding districts, having 
found a leader in a former soldier of fortune, 
Hans Miiller by name. The so-called Evan- 

^ JjThose interested will find the events briefly sketched in 
the present chapter exhaustively treated, with full elaboration 
of detail, in the two previous volumes of mine, The Peasanfs 
War in Germany and The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists 
(Messrs. George Allen & Unwin). 

183 



184. GERMAN CULTURE 

gelical Brotherhood sprang into existence. On 
the new movement becoming threatening it was 
opposed by the Swabian League, a body in 
the interests of the Germanic Federation, its 

! princes, and cities, whose function it was to 
preserve pubhc tranquillity and enforce the 
Imperial decrees. The peasant army was 
armed with the rudest weapons, including 

^ pitchforks, scythes, and axes ; but nothing 
decisive of a military character took place this 
year. Meanwhile the work of agitation was 
carried on far and wide throughout the South 
German territories. Preachers of discontent 
among the peasantry and the former towns 
were everywhere agitating and organizing with 
a view to a general rising in the ensuing spring. 
Negotiations were carried on throughout the 
winter with nobles and the authorities without 
important results. A diversion in favour of 
the peasants was caused by Duke Ulrich of 
Wiirtemberg favouring the peasants' cause, 
which he hoped to use as a shoeing-horn to 
his own plans for recovering his ancestral 
domains, from which he had been driven on 
the grounds of a family quarrel under the ban 
of the empire in 15 19. He now established 
himself in his stronghold of Hohentwiel, in 
Wiirtemberg, on the Swiss frontier. By 
February or the beginning of March peasant 
bands were organizing throughout Southern 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 185 

Germany. Early in March a so-called 
Peasants' Parliament was held at Memmin- 
gen, a small Swabian town, at which the 
principal charter of the movement, the so- 
called '* Twelve Articles/' was adopted. This 
important document has a strong religious 
colouring, the political and economic demands 
of the peasants being led up to and justified 
by Biblical quotations. They all turn on 
the customary grievances of the time. The 
" Twelve Articles " remain throughout th • 
chief Bill of Rights of the South German 
peasantry, though there were other versions of 
the latter current in certain districts. What 
was said before concerning the local sporadic 
movements which had been going on for a 
generation previously applies equally to the 
great uprising of 1525. The rapidity with 
which the ideas represented by the movement, 
and in consequence the movement itself, 
spread, is marvellous. By the middle of 
April it was computed that no less than 
300,000 peasants, besides necessitous towns- 
folk, were armed and in open rebellion. On 
the side of the nobles no adequate force was 
ready to meet the emergency. In every 
direction were to be seen flaming castles and 
monasteries. On all sides were bodies of 
armed countryfolk, organized in military 
fashion, dictating their will to the country- 



iS6 GERMAN CULTURE 

side and the small towns, whilst disaffection 
was beginning to show itself in a threatening 
manner among the popular elements of not a 
few important cities. A slight success gained 
by the Swabian League at the Upper Swabian 
village of Leipheim in the second week of April 
did not improve matters. In Easter week, 
1525, it looked indeed as if the "Twelve 
Articles " at least would become realized, if 
not the Christian Commonwealth dreamed of 
by the religious sectaries established through- 
out the length and breadth of Germany. 
Princes, lords, and ecclesiastical dignitaries 
were being compelled far and wide to save 
their lives, after their property was probably 
already confiscated, by swearing allegiance to 
the Christian League or Brotherhood of the 
peasants and by countersigning the " Twelve 
Articles " and other demands of their refrac- 
tory villeins and serfs. So threatening was 
the situation that the Archduke Ferdinand 
began himself to yield, in so far as to enter 
into negotiations with the insurgents. In 
many cases the leaders and chief men of the 
bands were got up in brilHant costume. We 
read of purple mantles and scarlet birettas with 
ostrich plumes as the costume of the leaders, 
of a suite of men in scarlet dress, of a vanguard 
of ten heralds, gorgeously attired. As Lam- 
precht justly observes {Deutsche Geschichte, 



• 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 187 



vol. V. p. 343) : '' The peasant revolts were, 
in general, less in the nature of campaigns, or 
even of an uninterrupted series of minor 
military operations, than of a slow process of 
mobilization, interrupted and accompanied by 
continual negotiations with lords and princes — 
a mobilization which was rendered possible by 
the standing right of assembly and of carry- 
ing arms possessed by the peasants." The 
smaller towns everywhere opened their gates 
without resistance to the peasants, between 
whom and the poorer inhabitants an under- 
standing commonly existed. The bands waxed 
fat with plunder of castles and religious houses, 
and did full justice to the contents of the rich 
monastic wine-cellars. 

Early in April occurred one of the most 
notable incidents. It was at the little town 
of Weinsberg, near the free town of Heil- 
bronn, in Wiirtemberg. The town, which was 
occupied by a body of knights and men-at- 
arms, was attacked on Easter Sunday by the 
peasant bands, foremost among them being the 
" black troop " of that knightly champion of 
the peasant cause, Florian Geyer. It was 
followed by a peasant contingent, led by one 
Jacklein Rohrbach, whose consuming passiotn 
was hatred of the ruling classes. The knights 
within the town were under the leadership of 
Count von Helfenstein. The entry of Rohr- 



i88 GERMAN CULTURE 

bach's company into Weinsberg was the signal 
for a massacre of the knightly host. Some 
were taken prisoners for the moment, including 
Helfenstein himself, but these were massacred 
next morning in the meadow outside the town 
by '* Jacklein," as he was called. The events 
at Weinsberg produced in the^ first instance 
a horror and consternation which was speedily 
followed by a lust for vengeance on the part 
of the privileged orders. 

In Franconia and Middle Germany the 
peasant movement went on apace. In Fran- 
conia one of its chief seats was the considerable 
town of Rothenburg, on the Tauber. The 
episcopal city of Wiirzburg was also entered 
and occupied by the peasant bands in coalition 
with the discontented elements of the town. 
The sacking of churches and throwing open 
of -religious houses characterized proceedings 
here as elsewhere. The locking up of a large 
peasant host in Wurzburg was undoubtedly a 
source of great weakness to the movement. 
In the east, in the Tyrol and Salzburg, there 
were similar risings to those farther west. In 
the latter case the prince -bishop was the 
obnoxious oppressor. 

. The most interesting of the local movements 
was, however, in many respects that of Thomas 
Miinzer in the town of Mulhausen, in 
Thuringia. Thomas Miinzer is, perhaps, the 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 189 

best known of all the names in the peasants' 
revolt. In addition to the ultra-Protestantism 
of his theological views, Miinzer had as his 
object the establishment of a communistic 
Christian Commonwealth. He started a prac- 
tical exemplification of this among his own 
followers in the town itself. 

Up to the beginning of May the insurrec- 
tion had carried everything before it. Truch- 
sess and his men of the Swabian League had 
proved themselves unable to cope with it. 
Matters now changed. Knights, men-at-arms, 
and free-lances were returning from the Italian 
campaign of Charles V after the battle of 
Pavia. Everywhere the revolt met with 
disaster. The Miilhausen insurgents were 
destroyed at Frankenhausen by forces of the 
Count of Hesse, of the Duke of Brunswick, 
and of the Duke of Saxony. This was on 
May 1 5 th. Three days before the defeat at 
Frankenhausen, on May 12th, a decisive 
defeat was inflicted on the peasants by the 
forces of the Swabian League, undter Truch- 
sess, at Boblingen, in Wlirtemberg. Savage 
ferocity signalized the treatment of the de- 
feated peasants by the soldiery of the nobles. 
Jacklein Rohrbach was roasted alive. Truch- 
sess with his soldiery then hurrieid north and 
inflicted a heavy defeat on the Franconian 
peasant contingents at Konigshaven, on the 



I90 GERMAN CULTURE 

Tauber. These three defeats, following one 
another in little more than a fortnight, broke 
the back of the whole movement in Germany 
proper. In Elsass and Lorraine the insurrec- 
tion was crushed by the hired troops and the 
Duke of Lorraine ; eastward, on the little river 
Luibas. In the Austrian territories, under the 
able leadership of Michael Gaismayr, one of 
the lesser nobility, it continued for some 
months longer, and the fear of Gaismayr, who, 
it should be said, was the only man of really 
constructive genius the movement had pro- 
duced, maintained itself with the privileged 
classes till his murder in the autumn of 1528, 
at the instance of the Bishop of Brixen. 

The great peasant insurrection in Germany 
failed through want of a well-thought-out plan 
and tactics, and, above all, through a want 
of cohesion among the various peasant forces 
operating in different sections of the country, 
between which no regular communications were 
kept up. The attitude of Martin Luther 
towards the peasants and their cause was base 
in the extreme. His action was mainly 
embodied in two documents, of which the 
first was issued about the middle of April, 
and the second a month later. The difference 
in tone between them is sufficiently striking. 
In the first, which bore the title, '' An Ex- 
hortation to Peace on the Twelve Articles of 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 191 

the Peasantry in Swabia," Luther sits on the 
fence, admonishing both parties of what he 
deemed their shortcomings. He was naturally 
pleased with those articles that demanded the 
free preaching of the Gospel and abused the 
Catholic clergy, and was not indisposed to 
assent to many of the economic demands. In 
fact, the document strikes one as distinctly 
more favourable to the insurgents than to their 
opponents. 

*' We have," he wrote, *' no one to thank 
for this mischief and sedition, save ye princes 
and lords, in especial ye blind bishops and 
mad priests and monks, who up to this day 
remain obstinate and do not cease to rage and 
rave against the holy Gospel, albeit ye know 
that it is righteous, and that ye may not gain- 
say it. Moreover, in your worldly regiment, 
ye do naught otherwise than flay and extort 
tribute, that ye may satisfy your pomp and 
vanity, till the poor, common man cannot, and 
may not, bear with it longer. The sword is 
on your neck. Ye think ye sit so strongly 
in your seats, that none may cast you from 
them. Such presumption and obstinate pride 
will twist your necks, as ye will see." And 
again : '' God hath made it thus that they 
cannot, and will not, longer bear with your 
raging. If ye do it not of your free will, 
so shall ye be made to do it by way of 



192 GERMAN CULTURE 

violence and undoing." vOnce more : '' It is 
not peasants, my dear lords, who have set 
themselves up against you. God Himself it 
is who setteth Himself against you to chastise 
your evil-doing." 

He counsels the princes and lords to make 
peace with their peasants, observing with 
reference to the '' Twelve Articles " that some 
of them are so just and righteous that before 
God and the world their worthiness is mani- 
fested, making good the words of the psalm 
that they heap contempt upon the heads of 
the princes. Whilst he warns the peasants 
against sedition and rebellion, and criticizes 
some of the Articles as going beyond the 
justification of Holy Writ, and whilst he makes 
side-hits at *' the prophets of murder and the 
spirits of confusion which had found their way 
among them," the general impression given by 
the pamphlet is, as already said, one of un- 
mistakable friendliness to the peasants and 
hostility to the lords. 

The manifesto may be summed up in the 
following terms : Both sides are, strictly 
speaking, in the wrong, but the princes and 
lords have provoked the ** common man " by 
their unjust exactions and oppressions ; the 
peasants, on their side, have gone too far in 
many of their demands, notably in the refusal 
to pay tithes, and most of all in the notion of 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 193 

abolishing villeinage, which Luther declares to 
be ** straightway contrary to the Gospel and 
thievish/' The great sin of the princes 
remains, however, that of having thrown 
stumbling-blocks in the way of the Gospel 
— bien entendu the Gospel according to Luther 
— and the main virtue of the peasants was their 
claim to have this Gospel preached. It can 
scarcely be doubted that the ambiguous tone 
of Luther's rescript was interpreted by the 
rebellious peasants to their advantage and 
served to stimulate, rather than to check, 
the insurrection. 

Meanwhile, the movement rose higher and 
higher, and reached Thuringia, the district 
with which Luther personally was most 
associated. His patron, and what is more, 
the only friend of toleration in high places, 
the noble-minded Elector Friedrich of Saxony, 
fell ill and died on May 5th, and was suc- 
ceeded by his younger brother Johann, the 
same who afterwards assisted in the suppres- 
sion of the Thuringian revolt. Almost imme- 
diately thereupon Luther, who had been visiting 
his native town of Eisleben, travelled through 
the revolted districts on his way back to 
Wittenberg. He everywhere encountered black 
looks and jeers. When he preached, the 
Miinzerites would drown his voice by the 
ringing of bells. The signs of rebellion greeted 

13 



194 GERMAN CULTURE 



i 



I 

II 



him on all sides. The '' Twelve Articles " were 
constantly thrown at his head. As the reports 
of violence towards the property and persons 
of some of his own noble friends reached him 
his rage broke all bounds. He seems, how- 
ever, to have prudently waited a few days, 
until the cause of the peasants was obviously 
nopeless, before publicly taking his stand on 
the side of the authorities. 

On his arrival in Wittenberg, he wrote a 
second pronoimcement on the contemporary 
events, in which no uncertainty was left as 
to his attitude. It is entitled, *' Against the 
Murderous and Thievish Bands of Peasants." ^ 
Here he lets himself loose on the side of the 
oppressors with a bestial ferocity. *' Crush 
them" (the peasants), he writes, '* strangle 
them and pierce them, in secret places and 
in sight of men, he who can, even as one ij 
would strike dead a mad dog ! " All having 
authority who hesitated to extirpate the in- 
surgents to the uttermost were committing a 
sin against God. " Findest thou thy death 
therein," he writes, addressing the reader, 

^ Amongst the curiosities of literature may be included the 
translation of the title of this manifesto by Prof. T. M. 
Lindsay, D.D., in the EncyclopcEdia Britanmca, 9th edition 
(Article, " Luther ^'). The German title is " Wider die mor- 
derischen und rauberischen Rotten der Bauern." Prof. 
Lindsay's translation is " Against the murdering, robbing Rats 
\_sic\ of Feasants " ! 



II 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 195 

'' happy art thou ; a more blessed death can 
never overtake thee, for thou diest in obedi- 
ence to the Divine word and the command of 
Romans xiii. i, and in the service of love, to 
save thy neighbour from the bonds of hell 
and the devil." Never had there been such 
an infamous exhortation to the most dastardly 
murder on a wholesale scale since the 
Albigensian crusade with its ** Strike them 
all ; God will know His own '' — a sentiment 
indeed that Luther almost literally reproduces 
in one passage. ^ 

The attitude of the official Lutheran party 
towards the poor countryfolk continued 
as infamous after the war as it had been 
on the first sign that fortune was for- 
saking their cause. Like master, like man. 
Luther's jackal, the *' gentle '' Melanchthon, 
specially signalized himself by urging on the 
feudal barons with Scriptural arguments to the 
blood-sucking and oppression of their villeins. 
A humane and honourable nobleman, Heinrich 
von Einsiedel, was touched in conscience at 
the corvees and heavy dues to which he found 
himself entitled. He sent to Luther for advice 
upon the subject. Luther replied that the 
existing exactions which had been handed 
down to him from his parents need not trouble 
his conscience, adding that it would not be 
good for corvees to be given up, since the 



196 GERMAN CULTURE 

*' common man '' ought to have burdens im- 
posed upon him^, as otherwise he would become 
overbearing. He further remarked that a 
severe treatment in material things was 
pleasing to God, even though it might seem 
to be too harsh. Spalatin writes in a like 
strain that the burdens in Germany were, if 
anything, too light. Subjects, according to 
Melanchthon, ought to know that they are 
serving God in the burdens they bear for 
their superiors, whether it were journeying, 
paying tribute, or otherwise, and as pleasing 
to God as though they raised the dead at God's 
own behest. Subjects should look up to their 
lords as wise and just men, and hence be 
thankful to them. However unjust, tyrannical, 
and cruel the lord might be, there was never 
any justification for rebellion. 

A friend and follower of Luther and 
Melanchthon — Martin Butzer by name— went 
still farther. According to this ** reforming " 
worthy a subject was to obey his lord in 
everything. This was all that concerned him. 
It was not for him to consider whether what 
was enjoined was, or was not, contrary to the 
will of God. That was a matter for his feudal 
superior and God to settle between them. 
Referring to the doctrines of the revolutionary 
sects, Butzer urges the authorities to extirpate 
all those professing a false religion. Such 



i 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 197 

men, he says, deserve a heavier punishment 
than thieves, robbers, and murderers. Even 
their wives and innocent children and cattle 
should be destroyed {ap. Jansseriy vol. i. 

p. 595). 

Luther himself quotes, in a sermon on 

*' Genesis," the instances of Abraham and 
Abimelech and other Old Testament worthies, 
as justifying slavery and the treatment of a 
slave as a beast of burden. '' Sheep, cattle, 
men-servants and maid-servants, they were all 
possessions," says Luther, '' to be sold as it 
pleased them like other beasts. It were even 
a good thing were it still so. For else no 
man may compel nor tame the servile folk " 
{Sdmmtliche Werke, vol. xv. p. 276). In other 
discourses he enforces the same doctrine, 
observing that if the world is to last for 
any time, and is to be kept going, it will be 
necessary to restore the patriarchal condition. 
Capito, the Strassburg preacher, in a letter 
to a colleague, writes lamenting that the 
pamphlets and discourses of Luther had con- 
tributed not a little to give edge to the blood- 
thirsty vengeance of the princes and nobles 
after the insurrection. 

The total number of the peasants and their 
allies who fell either in fighting or at the 
hands of the executioners is estimated b) 
Anselm in his Berner Chronik at 130,000. It 



198 GERMAN CULTURE 

was certainly not less than 100,000. For 
months after the executioner was active in 
many of the affected districts. Spalatin says : 
** Of hanging and beheading there is no end." 
Another writer has it : ** It was all so that even 
a stone had been moved to pity, for the 
chastisement and vengeance of the conquering 
lords was great." The executions within the 
jurisdiction of the Swabian League alone are 
stated at 10,000. Truchsess's provost boasted 
of having hanged or beheaded 1,200 with his 
own hand. More than 50,000 fugitives were 
recorded. These, according to a Swabian 
League order, were all outlawed in such wise 
that any one who found them might slay them 
without fear of consequences. 

The sentences and executions were con- 
ducted with true medieval levity. It is 
narrated in a contemporary chronicle that 
in one village in the Henneberg territory all 
the inhabitants had fled on the approach of 
the Count and his men-at-arms save two tilers. 
The two were being led to execution when 
one appeared to weep bitterly, and his reply 
to interrogatories was that he bewailed the 
dwellings of the aristocracy thereabouts, for 
henceforth there would be no one to supply 
them with durable tiles. Thereupon his com- 
panion burst out laughing, because, said he, 
it had just occurred to him that he would 



I 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 199 

not know where to place his hat after his 
head had been taken off. These mildly 
humorous remarks obtained for both of them 
a free pardon. 

The aspect of those parts of the country 
where the war had most heavily raged was 
deplorable in the extreme. In addition to 
the many hundreds of castles and monasteries 
destroyed, almost as many villages and small 
towns had been levelled with the ground by 
one side or the other, especially by the 
Swabian League and the various princely 
forces. Many places were annihilated for 
having taken part with the peasants, even when 
they had been compelled by force to do so. 
Fields in these districts were everywhere laid 
waste or left uncultivated. Enormous sums 
were exacted as indemnity. In many of the 
villages peasants previously well-to-do were 
ruined. There seemed no limit to the bleed- 
ing of the *' common man," under the pretence 
of compensation for damage done by the 
insurrection. 

The condition of the families of the dead 
and of the fugitives was appalling. Numbers 
perished from starvation. The wives and 
children of the insurgents were in some 
cases forcibly driven from their homesteads 
and even from their native territory. In one 
of the pamphlets published in 1525 anent the 



200 GERMAN CULTURE 

events of that year we read : '' Houses are 
burned ; fields and vineyards lie fallow ; || 
clothes and household goods are robbed or 
burned ; cattle and sheep are taken away ; the 11 
same as to horses and trappings. The prince, 
the gentleman, or the nobleman will have his 
rent and due. Eternal God, whither shall the 
widows and poor children go forth to seek 
it?'' Referring to the Lutheran campaign 
against friars and poor scholars, beggars, and 
pilgrims, the writer observes : ** Think ye now 
that because of God's anger for the sake of 
one beggar, ye must even for a season bear 
with twenty, thirty, nay, still more?" 

The courts of arbitration, which were estab- 
lished in various districts to adjudicate on 
the relations between lords and villeins, were 
naturally not given to favour the latter, whilst 
the fact that large numbers of deeds and 
charters had been burnt or otherwise de- 
stroyed in the course of the insurrection left 
open an extensive field for the imposition of 
fresh burdens. The record of the proceed- 
ings of one of the most important of these 
courts — that of the Swabian League's jurisdic- 
tion, which sat at Memmingen — in the dispute 
between the prince-abbot of Kempten and his 
villeins is given in full in Baumann's Akten, 
pp. 329-46. Here, however, the peasants did 
not come off so badly as in some other places. 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 201 

Meanwhile, all the other evils of the time, 
the monopolies of the merchant-princes of the 
cities and of the trading-syndicates, the dear- 
ness of living, the scarcity of money, etc., did 
not abate, but rather increased from year to 
year. The Catholic Church maintained itself 
especially in the South of Germany, and the 
official Reformation took on a definitely aris- 
tocratic character. 

According to Baumann (Akten, Vorwort, 
V, vi), the true soul of the movement of 1525 
consisted in the notion of *' Divine justice," 
the principle ** that all relations, whether of 
political, social, or religious nature, have got 
to be ordered according to the directions of 
the * Gospel ' as the sole and exclusive source 
and standard of all justice.'' The same 
writer maintains that there are three phases 
in the development of this idea, according to 
which he would have the scheme of historical 
investigation subdivided. In Upper Swabia, 
says he, *' Divine justice " found expression in 
the well-known *' Twelve Articles,'* but here 
the notion of a political reformation was as 
good as absent. 

In the second phase, the '' Divine justice " 
idea began to be applied to political con- 
ditions. In Tyrol and the Austrian dominions, 
he observes, this political side manifested itself 
in local or, at best, territorial patriotism. It 



202 GERMAN CULTURE 

was only in Franconia that all territorial 
patriotism or '' particularism " was shaken off 
and the idea of the unity of the German 
peoples received as a political goal. The 
Franconian influence gained over the Wiirtem- | 
bergers to a large extent, and the plan of ' 
reform elaborated by Weigand and Hipler for 
the Heilbronn Parliament was the most com- 
plete expression of this second phase of the 
movement. 

The third phase is represented by the rising 
in Thuringia, and especially in its intellectual 
head, Thomas Miinzer. Here we have the 
doctrine of *' Divine justice " taking precedence 
of all else and assuming the form of a 
thoroughgoing theocratic scheme, to be realized 
by the German people . 

This division Baumann is led to make with 
a view to the formulation of a convenient 
scheme for a '' codex " of documents relating 
to the Peasants' War. It may be taken as, 
in the main, the best general division that can 
be put forward, although, as we have seen, 
there are places where, and times when, the 
practical demands of the movement seem to 
have asserted themselves directly and spon- 
taneously apart from any theory whatever. 

Of the fate of many of the most active 
leaders of the revolt we know nothing. Several 
heads of the movement, according to a con- 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 203 

temporary writer, wandered about for a long 
time in misery, some of them indeed seeking 
refuge with the Turks, who were still a stand- 
ing menace to Imperial Christendom. The 
popular preachers vanished also on the sup- 
pression of the movement. The disastrous 
result of the Peasants' War was prejudicial 
even to Luther's cause in South Germany. The 
Catholic party reaped the advantage every- 
where, evangelical preachers, even, where not 
insurrectionists, being persecuted. Little dis- 
tinction, in fact, was made in most districts 
between an opponent of the Catholic Church 
from Luther's standpoint and one from Karl- 
stadt's or Hubmayer's. Amongst seventy-one 
heretics arraigned before the Austrian court at 
Ensisheim, only one was acquitted. The 
others were broken on the wheel, burnt, or 
drowned . 

There were some who were arrested ten or 
fifteen years later on charges connected with 
the 1525 revolt. Treachery, of course, 
played a large part, as it has done in 
all defeated movements, in ensuring the fate 
of many of those who had been at all 
prominent. In fairness to Luther, who other- 
wise played such a villainous role in connection 
with the peasants' movement, the fact should 
be recorded that he sheltered his old colleague, 
Karlstadt, for a short time in the Augustine 



204 GERMAN CULTURE 

monastery at Wittenberg, after the latter's 
escape from Rothenburg. 

Wendel Hipler continued for some time at 
liberty, and might probably have escaped 
altogether had he not entered a protest 
against the Counts of Hohenlohe for having 
seized a portion of his private fortune that 
lay within their power. The result of his 
action might have been foreseen. The Counts, 
on hearing of it, revenged themselves by 
accusing him of having been a chief pillar 
of the rebellion. He had to flee immediately, 
and, after wandering about for some time in 
a disguise, one of the features of which is 
stated to have been a false nose, he was seized 
on his way to the Reichstag which was being 
held at Speier in 1526. Tenacious of his 
property to the last, he had hoped to obtain 
restitution of his rights from the assembled 
estates of the empire. Some months later he 
died in prison at Neustadt. 

Of the victors, Truchsess and Frundsberg 
considered themselves badly treated by the 
authorities whom they had served so well, and 
Frundsberg even composed a lament on his 
neglect. This he loved to hear sung to the 
accompaniment of the harp as he swilled 
down his red wine. The cruel Markgraf 
Kasimir met a miserable death not long after 
from dysentery, whilst Cardinal Matthaus 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 205 

Lang, the Archbishop of Salzburg, ended 
his days insane. 

Of the fate of other prominent men con- 
nected with the events described, we have 
spoken in the course of the narrative. 

The castles and religious houses, which 
were destroyed, as already said, to the number 
of many hundreds, were in most cases not 
built up again. The ruins of not a few of 
them are visible to this day. Their owners 
often spent the sums relentlessly wrung out 
of the '' common man '' as indemnity in the 
extravagances of a gay life in the free towns 
or in dancing attendance at the Courts of the 
princes and the higher nobles. The collapse of 
the revolt was indeed an important link in the 
particular chain of events that was so rapidly 
destroying the independent existence of the 
lower nobility as a separate status with a 
definite political position, and transforming the 
face of society generally. Life in the smaller 
castle, the knight's burg or tower, was already 
tending to become an anachronism. The 
Court of the prince, lay or ecclesiastic, was 
attracting to itself all the elements of nobility 
below it in the social hierarchy. The revolt of 
1525 gave a further edge to this develop- 
ment, the first act of which closed with the 
collapse of the knights' rebellion and death 
of Sickingen in 1523. The knight was be- 



206 GERMAN CULTURE 

coming superfluous in the economy of the body 
politic. 

The rise of capitalism, the sudden develop- 
ment of the world-market, the substitution 
of a money medium of exchange for direct 
barter — all these new factors were doing 
their work. Obviously the great gainers 
by the events of the momentous year 
were the representatives of the central- 
izing principle. But the effective central- 
izing principle was not represented by the 
Emperor, for he stood for what was after 
all largely a sham centralism, because it was 
a centralism on a scale for which the Germanic 
world was not ripe. Princes and margraves 
were destined to be the bearers of the terri- 
torial centralization, the only real one to which 
the German peoples were to attain for a long 
time to come. Accordingly, just as the pro- 
vincial grand seigneur of France became the 
courtier of the French King at Paris or 
Versailles, so the previously quasi -independent 
German knight or baron became the courtier 
or hanger-on of the prince within or near 
whose territory his hereditary manor was 
situate. 

The eventful year 1525 was truly a land- 
mark in German history in many ways — the 
year of one of the most accredited exploits 
of Doctor Faustus, the last mythical hero the 



GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS 207 

progressive races have created ; the year in 
which Martin Luther, the ex -monk, capped his 
repudiation of Catholicism and all its ways by 
marrying an ex -nun ; the year of the definite 
victory of Charles V, the German Emperor, 
over Francis I, the French King, which meant 
the final assertion of the '' Holy Roman 
Empire " as being a national German institu- 
tion ; and last, but not least, the year of the 
greatest and the most widespread popular 
movement Central Europe had yet seen, and 
the last of the mediaeval peasant risings on a 
large scale. The movement of the eventful 
year did not, however, as many hoped and 
many feared, within any short time rise up 
again from its ashes, after discomfiture had 
overtaken it. In 1526, it is true, the genius 
of Gaismayr succeeded in resuscitating it, not 
without prospect of ultimate success, in the 
Tyrol and other of the Austrian territories . In 
this year, moreover, in other outlying districts, 
even outside German -speaking populations, the 
movement flickered. Thus the traveller be- 
tween the town of Bellinzona, in the Swiss 
Canton of Ticino, and the Bernardino Pass, in 
Canton Graubiinden, may see to-day an im- 
posing ruin, situated on an eminence in the 
narrow valley just above the small Italian- 
speaking town of Misox. This was one of 
the ancestral strongholds of the family, well 




2o8 GERMAN CULTURE 

known in Italian history, of the Trefuzios or 
Trevulzir, and was sacked by the inhabitants 
of Misox and the neighbouring peasants in 
the summer of 1526, contemporaneously with 
Gaismayr's rising in the Tyrol. A connection 
between the two events would be difficult to 
trace, but the destruction of the castle of 
Misox, if not a purely spontaneous local effer- 
vescence, looks like an afterglow of the great 
movement, such as may well have happened 
in other secluded mountain valleys. 

The Peasants' War in Germany we have 
been considering is the last great medieval 
uprising of the agrarian classes in Europe. 
Its result was, with some few exceptions, a 
riveting of the peasant's chains and an increase 
of his burdens. More than 1,000 castles and 
religious houses were destroyed in Germany 
alone during 1525. Many priceless works of 
mediaeval art of all kinds perished. But we 
must not allow our regret at such vandalism 
to blind us in any way to the intrinsic 
righteousness of the popular demands. 

The elements of revolution now became 
absorbed by the Anabaptist movement, a 
continuation primarily in the religious sphere 
of the doctrines of the Zwickau enthusiasts 
and also in many respects of Thomas Miinzer. 
At first Northern Switzerland, especially the 
towns of Basel and Zurich, were the head- 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 209 

quarters of the new sect, which, however, 
spread rapidly on all sides. Persecution of 
the direst description did not destroy it. On 
the contrary, it seemed only to have the effect 
of evoking those social and revolutionary 
elements latent within it which were at first 
overshadowed by more purely theological 
interests. As it was, the hopes and aspira- 
tions of the ** common man " revived this time 
in a form indissolubly associated with the 
theocratic commonwealth, the most prominent 
representative of which during the earlier 
movement had been Thomas Miinzer. 

But, notwithstanding resemblances, it is 
utterly incorrect, as has sometimes been done, 
to describe any of the leaders of the great 
peasant rebellion of 1525 as Anabaptists. The 
Anabaptist sect, it is true, originated in Switzer- 
land during the rising, but it was then confined 
to a small coterie of unknown enthusiasts, hold- 
ing semi -private meetings in Zurich. It was 
from these small beginnings that the great 
Anabaptist movement of ten years later arose. 
It is directly from them that the Anabaptist 
movement of history dates its origin. Move- 
ments of a similar character, possessing a 
strong family likeness, belong to the mental 
atmosphere of the time in Germany. The so- 
called Zwickau prophets, for example, Nicholas 
Storch and his colleagues, seem in their general 

H 



2 TO GERMAN CULTURE 

attitude to have approached very closely to 
the principles of the Anabaptist sectaries. 
But even here it is incorrect to regard them, 
as has often been done, as directly connected 
with the latter ; still more as themselves the 
germ of the Anabaptist party of the follow- 
ing years. Thomas Miinzer, the only leader 
of the movement of 1525 who seems to have 
been acquainted with the Zurich enthusiasts, 
was by no means at one with them on many 
points, notably refusing to attach any impor- 
tance to their special sign, rebaptism. Chief 
among the Ziirich coterie may be mentioned 
Konrad Grebel, at whose house the sect first 
of all assembled. At first the Anabaptist 
movement at Zurich was regarded as an ex- 
treme wing of the party of the Church reformer, 
Zwingli, in that city, but it was not long before 
it broke ofif entirely from the latter, and 
hostilities, ensuing in persecution for the new 
party, broke out. 

To understand the true inwardness of the 
Anabaptist and similar movements, it is 
necessary to endeavour to think oneself 
back into the intellectual conditions of 
the period. The Biblical text itself, now 
everywhere read and re-read in the Ger- 
man language, was pondered and discussed 
in the house of the handicraftsman and in the 
hut of the peasant, with as much confidence 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 211 

of interpretation as in the study of the pro- 
fessional theologian. But there were also not 
a few of the latter order, as we have seen, 
who were becoming disgusted with the trend 
of the official Reformation and its leading 
representatives. The Bible thus afforded a 
point d'appui for the mystical tendencies now 
becoming universally prominent — a point 
d'appui lacking to the earlier movements of 
the same kind that were so constantly arising 
during the Middle Ages proper. Seen in the 
dim religious light of a continuous reading of 
the Bible and of very little else, the world 
began to appear in a new aspect to the 
simple soul who practised it. All things 
seemed filled with the immediate presence of 
Deity. He who felt a call pictured himself 
as playing the part of the Hebrew prophet. 
He gathered together a small congregation of 
followers, who felt themselves as the children 
of God in the midst of a, heathen world. Did 
not the fall of the old Church mean that the 
day was at hand when the elect should govern 
the world? It was not so much positive 
doctrines as an attitude of mind that was the 
ruling spirit in Anabaptism and like move- 
ments. Similarly, it was undoubtedly such a 
sensitive impressionism rather than any posi- 
tive dogma that dominated the first generation 
of the Christian Church itself. How this acted 



212 GERMAN CULTURE 



I 



in the case of the earher Anabaptists we shall 
presently see. 

The new Zurich sect, by one of those seem- 
ingly inscrutable chances in similar cases of 
which history is full, not only prospered greatly 
but went forth conquering and to conquer. It 
spread rapidly northward, eastward, and west- 
ward. In the course of its victorious career 
it absorbed into itself all similar tendencies 
and local groups and movements having like 
aims to itself. As was natural under such 
circumstances, we find many different strains 
in the developed Anabaptist movement. The 
theologian Bullinger wrote a book on the sub- 
ject, in which he enumerates thirteen distinct 
sects, as he terms them, in the Anabaptist 
body. The general tenets of the organization, 
as given by Bullinger, may be summarized as 
follows : They regard themselves as the true 
Church of Christ well pleasing to God ; they 
believe that by rebaptism a man is received 
into the Church ; they refuse to hold inter- 
course with other Churches or to recognize 
their ministers ; they say that the preachings 
of these are different from their works, that 
no man is the better for their preaching, that 
their ministers follow not the teaching of Paul, 
that they take payment from their benefices, 
but do not work by their hands ; that the Sacra- 
ments are improperly served, and that every 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 213 

mail;, who feels the call, has the right to 
preach ; they maintain that the literal text of 
the Scriptures shall be accepted without com- 
ment or the additions of theologians ; they 
protest against the Lutheran doctrine of justi- 
fication by faith alone ; they maintain that true 
Christian love makes it inconsistent for any 
Christian to be rich, but that among the 
Brethren all things should be in common, or, 
at least, all available for the assistance of needy 
Brethren and for the common cause; that the 
attitude of the Christian towards authority 
should be that of submission and endurance 
only ; that no Christian ought to take office 
of any kind, or to take part in any form of 
military service ; that secular authority has no 
concern with religious belief ; that the 
Christian resists no evil and therefore needs 
no law courts nor should ever make use of 
their tribunals ; that Christians do not kill or 
punish with imprisonment or the sword, but 
only with exclusion from the body of believers ; 
that no man should be compelled by force to 
believe, nor should any be slain on account 
of his faith ; that infant baptism is sinful and 
that adult baptism is the only Christian 
baptism — baptism being a sacrament which 
should be reserved for the elect alone. 

Such seem to represent the doctrines forming 
the common ground of the Anabaptist groups 



214 GERMAN CULTURE 

as they existed at the end of the second decade 
of the fifteenth century. There were, how- 
ever, as Heinrich Bulhnger and his contem- 
porary, Sebastian Franck, point out, numerous 
divergencies between the various sections of the 
party. Many of these recalled other mediaeval 
heretic sects, e.g. the Cathari, the Brothers 
and Sisters of the Spirit, the Bohemian 
Brethren, etc. 

For the first few years of its existence 
Anabaptism remained true to its original 
theologico -ethical principles. The doctrine of 
non-resistance was strictly adhered to. The 
Brethren believed in themselves as the elect, 
and that they had only to wait in prayer and 
humility for the *' advent of Christ and His 
saints," the *' restitution of all things," the 
''establishment of. the Kingdom of God upon 
earth," or by whatever other phrase the 
dominant idea of the coming change was ex- 
pressed. During the earlier years of the move- 
ment the Anabaptists were peaceable and 
harmless fanatics and visionaries. In some 
cases, as in Moravia, they formed separate 
communities of their own, some of which 
survived as religious sects long after the 
extinction of the main movement. 

In the earlier years of the fourth decade 
of the century, however, a change came over 
a considerable section of the movement. In 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 215 

Central and South-eastern Germany, notably 
in the Moravian territories, barring isolated 
individuals here and there, the Anabaptist 
party continued to maintain its attitude 
of non-resistance and the voluntariness of 
association which characterized it at first. The 
fearful waves of persecution, however, which 
successively swept over it were successful at last 
in partially checking its progress. At length 
the only places in this part of the empire where 
it succeeded in retaining any effective organiza- 
tion was in the Moravian territories, where 
persecution was less strong! and the commu- 
nities more closely knit toigtether than else- 
where. Otherwise persecution had played sad 
havoc with the original Anabaptist groups 
throughout Central Europe. 

Meanwhile a movement had sprung up in 
Western and Northern Germany, following the 
course of the Rhine Valley, that effectually 
threw the older movement of Southern and 
Eastern Germany into the background. These 
earlier movements remained essentially re- 
ligious and theological, owing, as Cornelius 
points out {Miinsterische Aafrahr, vol. ii. 
p. 74), to the fact that they cam'e imme- 
diately after the overthrow of the great 
political movement of 1552. But although 
the older Anabaptism did not itself take 
political shape, it succeeded in keeping 



2i6 GERMAN CULTURE 

alive the tendencies and the enthusiasm out 
of which^ under favourable circumstances, a 
political movement inevitably grows. The 
. result was, as Cornelius further observes, an 
agitation of such a sweeping character that 
the fourth decade of the sixteenth century 
seemed destined to realize the ideals which 
the third decade had striven for in vain. 

The new direction in Anabaptism began in 
the rich and powerful Imperial city of S trass - 
burg, where peculiar circumstances afforded 
the Brethren a considerable amount of tolera- 
tion. It was in the year 1526 that Anabaptism 
first made its appearance in Strassburg. It 
was Anabaptism of the original type and con- 
ducted on the old theologico -ethical lines. 
But early in the year 1529 there arrived in 
Strassburg a much -travelled man, a skinner by 
trade, by name Melchior Hoffmann. He had 
been an enthusiastic adherent of the Reforma- 
tion, and it was not long before he joined 
the Strassburg Anabaptists and made his mark 
in their community. Owing to his personal 
magnetism and oratorical gifts, Melchior soon 
came to be regarded as a specially ordained 
prophet and to have acquired corresponding 
influence. After a few months Hoffmann 
seems to have left Strassburg for a propa- 
gandist tour along the Rhine. The tour, 
apparently, had great success, the Baptist 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 217 

communities being founded in all important 
towns as far as Holland, in which latter 
country the doctrines spread rapidly. The 
Anabaptism, however, taught by Melchior and 
his disciples did not include the precept of 
patient submission to wrong which was such 
a prominent characteristic of its earlier phase. 
Some time after his reception into the Ana- 
baptist body at Strassbui^g, Hoffmann, while 
in most other points accepting the prevalent 
doctrines of the Brethren, broke entirely loose 
from the doctrine of non-resistance, maintain- 
ing, in theory at least, the right of the elect 
to employ the sword against the worldly 
authorities, *' the godless," '* the enemies of the 
saints." It was predicted, he maintained, that 
a two-edged sword should be given into the 
hands of the saints to destroy the *' mystery of 
iniquity," the existing principalities and powers, 
and the time was now at hand when this 
prophecy should be fulfilled. The new move- 
ment in the North-west, in the lower Rhenish 
districts, and the adjacent Westphalia sprang 
up and extended itself, therefore, under the 
domination of this idea of the reign of the 
saints in the approaching millennium and of 
the notion that passive non-resistance, whilst 
for the time being a duty, only remained so 
until the coming of the Lord should give the 
signal for the saints to rise and join in the 



2i8 GERMAN CULTURE 

destruction of the kingdoms of this world and 
the inauguration of the Kingdom of God on 
earth. Hoffmann's whole learning seems to' 
have been limited to the Bible, but this he 
knew from cover to cover. A diffusion of 
Luther's translation of the Bible had produced 
a revolution. The poorer classes, who were 
able to read at all, pored over the Bible, 
together with such popular tracts or pamphlets 
commenting thereon, or treating current social 
questions in tlie light of Biblical story and 
teaching, as came into their hands. The 
followers of the new movement in question 
acquired the name of Melchiorites. Hoffmann 
now published a book explanatory of his ideas, 
called The Ordinance of Gody which had an 
enormous popularity. It was followed up by 
other writings, amplifying and defending the 
main thesis it contained. 

Outwardly the Melchiorite communities of 

the North-west had the same peageful 

character as those of South Germany and 

Moravia, holding as they did in the 

main the same doctrines. It was ominous, 

however, that Melchior Hoffmann was 

, proclaimed as the prophet Elijah returned 

\ according to promise. Up to 1533 Strassburg 

/ continued to be regarded as the chief seat of 

Anabaptism, especially by Melchior and his 

disciples. It was, they declared, to be the 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 219 

New Jerusalem, from which the saints should 
march out to conquer the world. Melchior, 
on his return journey to Strassburg from his 
journey northwards, proclaimed the end of 
1533 as the date of the second advent and the 
inauguration of the reign of the saints. Owing 
to the excitement among the poorer popula- 
tion of the town consequent upon Hoffmann's 
preaching, the prophet was arrested and im- 
prisoned in one of the towers of the city wall. 
But 1533 came and went without the Lord 
or His saints appearing, while poor Hoffmann 
remained confined in the tower of the city wall. 
Meanwhile the new Anabaptism spread and 
fermented along the Rhine, and especially in 
Holland. In the latter country its chief ex- 
ponent was a master baker at Harleem, by 
name Jan Matthys, who seems to have been 
a born leader of men. While preaching essen- 
tially the same doctrines as Hoffmann, with 
Matthys a Holy War, in a literal sense, was 
placed in the forefront of his teaching. With 
him there was to be no delay. It was the 
duty of all the Brethren to show their zeal 
by at once seizing the sword of sharpness and 
mowing down the godless therewith. In this 
sense Matthys completed the transformation 
begun by Hoffmann. Melchior had indeed 
rejected the non-resistance doctrine in its 
absolute form, but he does not appear in his 



220 GERMAN CULTURE 

teaching to have uniformly emphasized the 
point, and certainly did not urge the destruc- 
tion of the godless as an immediate duty to 
be fulfilled without delay. With him was 
always the suggestion, expressed or implied, 
of waiting for the signal from heaven, the 
coming of the Lord, before proceeding to 
action. With Matthys there was no need for 
waiting, even for a day ; the time was not 
merely at hand, it had already come. His 
influence among the Brethren was immense. 
If Melchior Hoffmann had been Elijah, Jan 
Matthys was Elisha, who should bring his work 
to a conclusion. 

Among Matthys' most intimate followers was 
Jan Bockelson, from Leyden. Bockelson was 
a handsome and striking figure. He was the 
illegitimate son of one Bockel, a merchant 
and Biirgermeister of Saevenhagen, by a 
peasant woman from the neighbourhood of 
Miinster, who was in his service. After 
Jan's birth Bockel married the woman and 
bought her her freedom from the villein 
status that was hers by heredity. Jan 
was taught the tailoring handicraft at 
Leyden, but seems to have received little 
schooling. His natural abilities, however, 
were considerable, and he eagerly devoured the 
religious and propagandist literature of the 
time. Amongst other writings the pamphlets 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 221 

of Thomas Miinzer especially fascinated him. 
He travelled a good deal, visiting Mechlin and 
working at his trade for four years in London. 
Returning home, he threw himself into the 
xAnabaptist agitation, and, scarcely twenty-five 
years old, he was won over to the doctrines 
of Jan Matthys. The latter with his younger 
colleague welded the Anabaptist communities 
in Holland and the adjacent German territories 
into a well -organized federation. They were 
more homogeneous in theory than those of 
Southern and Eastern Germany, being prac- 
tically all united on the basis of the Hoffmann- 
Matthys propaganda. 

The episcopal town of Miinster, in West- 
phalia, like other places in the third decade 
of the sixteenth century, became strongly 
affected by the Reformation. But that the 
ferment of the time was by no means wholly 
the outcome of religious zeal, as subsequent 
historians have persisted in representing it, was 
recognized by the contemporary heads of the 
official Reformation. Thus, writing to Luther 
under date August 29, 1530, his satellite, 
Melanchthon, has the candour to admit that 
the Imperial cities *' care not for religion, for 
their endeavour is only toward domination and 
freedom." As the principal town of West- 
phalia at this time may be reckoned the chief 
city of the bishopric of Miinster, this important 



222 GERMAN CULTURE 

ecclesiastical principality was held ** imme- 
diately of the empire." It had as its neigh- 
bours Ost-Friesland, Oldenburg, the bishopric 
of Osnabriick, the county of Marck, and the 
duchies of Berg and Cleves. Its territory was 
half the size of the present province of West- 
phalia, and was divided into the upper and 
lower diocese, which were separated by the 
territory of Fecklenburg. The bishop was a 
prince of the empire and one of the most im- 
portant magnates of North-western Germany, 
but in ecclesiastical matters he was under the 
Archbishop of Koln. The diocese had been 
founded by Charles the Great. 

Owing to a succession of events, beginning 
in 1529, which for those interested we may 
mention may be found discussed in full detail 
in The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists 
(124-71), by the present writer, the extreme 
wing of the Reformation party had early gained 
the upper hand in the city, and subsequently 
became fused with the native Anabaptists, who 
were soon reinforced by their co-religionists 
from the country round, as well as from the 
not far distant Holland ; for it should be 
said that the Dutch followers of Hoffmann 
and Matthys had been energetic in carrying 
their faith into the towns of Westphalia as 
elsewhere. Without entering in detail into the 
events leading up to it, it is sufficient for our 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 223 

purpose to state that by a perfectly lawful 
election, held on February 23, 1534, the 
Government of Miinster was reconstituted and 
the Anabaptists obtained supreme political 
power. Hearing of the way things were going 
in Miinster, Matthys and his followers had 
already taken up their abode in the city a 
little time before. The cathedral and other 
churches were stormed and sacked during the 
following days, while all official documents and 
charters dealing with the feudal relations of 
the town were given to the flames during the 
ensuing month. Both the moderate Protestant 
(Lutheran) and the Catholic burghers who 
had remained were indignant at the acts of 
destruction committed, and openly expressed 
their opposition. The result was their expul- 
sion from the city ; the condition of being 
allowed to remain became now the consent 
to rebaptism and the formal adoption of 
Anabaptist principles. 

Miinster now took the place Strassburg 
had previously held as the rallying point 
of the Anabaptist faithful, whence a cru- 
sade against the Powers of the world 
was to issue forth. The Government of 
Miinster, though it officially consisted of 
the two Biirgermeisters and the new Council, 
to a man all zealous Anabaptists, left 
the real power and initiative in all measures 



224 GERMAN CULTURE 

in the hands of Jan Matthys and of 
disciple, Jan Bockelson, of Leyden. The' 
reign of the saints was now fairly begun. 
Various attempts at an organized communism 
were made, but th,ese appear to have been 
only partially successful. One day Jani 
Matthys with twenty companions, in anl 
access of fanatical devotion, made a sortie' 
from the town towards the bishop's camp. 
Needless to say, the party were all killed. The 
great leader dead, Jan Bockelson became 
naturally the chief of the city and head of 
the movement. 

Bockelson proved in every way a capable 
successor to Matthys. A new Constitution 
was now given by Bockelson and the 
Dutchmen, acting as his prophets and 
preachers. It was embodied in thirty -nine 
articles, and one of its chief features was the 
transference of power to twelve elders, the 
number being suggested by the twelve tribes 
of Israel. The idea of reliving the life of 
the *' chosen people," as depicted in the Old 
Testament, showed itself in various ways, 
amongst others by the notorious edict estab- 
lishing polygamy. This measure, however, as 
Karl Kautsky has shown, there is good reason 
for thinking was probably induced by the 
economic necessity of the time, and especially 
by the enormous excess of the female over the 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 225 

male population of the city. Otherwise the 
Miinsterites, like the Anabaptists generally, 
gave evidence of favouring asceticism in sexual 
matters . 

Considerations of space prevent us from 
going into further detail of the inner life 
of Miinster under the Anabaptist regime during 
the siege at the hands of its overlord, the 
prince-bishop. This will be found given at 
length in the work already mentioned . As time 
went on famine began to attack the city. 

It is sufficient for our purpose to state that 
on the night of June 24, 1535, the city 
was betrayed and that in a few hours the 
free-lances of the bishop were streaming 
in through all the gates. The street 
fighting was desperate ; the Anabaptists 
showed a desperate courage, even women 
joining in the struggle, hurling mis- 
siles from the windows upon their foes 
beneath. By midday on the 25th the city of 
Miinster, the New Zion, passed over once more 
into the power of its feudal lord, Franz von 
Waldeck, and the reign of the saints had come 
to an end. The vengeance of the conquerors 
was terrible ; all alike, irrespective of age 
or sex, were involved in an indiscriminate 
butchery. The three leaders, Bockelson, 
Krechting, and Knipperdollinck, after being- 
carried round captives as an exhibition through 

15 



226 GERMAN CULTURE 

the surrounding country, were, some months 
afterwards, on January 22, 1536, executed, 
after being most horribly tortured. Their 
bodies were subsequently suspended in three 
cages from the top of the tower of the Lamberti 
church. The three cages were left undisturbed 
until a few years ago, when the old tower, 
having become structurally unsafe, was pulled 
down and replaced, with questionable taste, 
by an ordinary modern steeple, on which, how- 
ever, the original cages may still be seen. A 
papal legate, sent on a mission to Miinster 
shortly after the events in question, relates that 
as he and his retinue neared the latter town 
'' more and more gibbets and wheels did we 
see on the highways and in the villages, where 
the false prophets and Anabaptists had suffered 
for their sins." 

I The Miinster incident was the culmination 
/of the Anabaptist movement. After the 
catastrophe the militant section rapidly de- 
clined. It did not die out, however, until 
towards the end of the century. The last we 
hear of it was in 1574, when a formidable 
insurrection took place again in Westphalia, 
under the leadership of one Wilhelmson, the 
son of one of the escaped Anabaptist preachers 
of Miinster. The movement lasted for five 
years. It was finally suppressed and Wilhelm- 
son burned alive at Cleves on March 5, 1580. 



THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT 227 

Meanwhile, soon after the fall of Miinster, the 
party split asunder, a moderate section form- 
ing, which shortly after came under the leader- 
ship of Menno Simon. This section, which 
soon became the majority of the party, under 
the name of Mennonites, settled down into a 
mere religious sect. In fact, towards the end 
of the sixteenth century the Anabaptist com- 
munities on the continent of Europe, from 
Moravia on the one hand to the extreme 
North-west of Germany on the other, showed 
a tendency to develop into law-abiding and 
prosperous religious organizations, in many 
cases being officially recognized by the 
authorities. 

The Anabaptist revolt of the fourth decade 
of the sixteenth century, though it may be 
regarded partly as a continuation or recrudes- 
cence, showed some differences from the 
peasant revolt of some years previously. The 
peasant rebellion, which reached its zenith in 
1525, was predominantly an agrarian move- 
ment, notwithstanding that it had had its 
echo among the poorer classes of the towns. 
The Anabaptist movement proper, which cul- 
minated in the Miinster '' reign of the saints '' 
in 1534-5, was predominantly a townsman's 
movement, notwithstanding that it had a con- 
siderable support from among the peasantry. 
The Anabaptists' leaders were not, as in the 



228 GERMAN CULTURE 

case of the Peasants' War, in the main drawn 
from the class of the '* man that wields the 
hoe" (to paraphrase the phraseology of the 
time) ; they were tailors, smiths, bakers, shoe- 
makers, or carpenters. They belonged, in 
short, to the class of the organized handi- 
craftsmen and journeymen who worked within 
city walls. A prominent figure in both move- 
ments was, however, the ex-priest or teacher. 
The ideal, or, if you will, the Utopian, element 
in the movement of Melchior Hoffmann, Jan 
Matthys, and Jan Bockelson — the element 
which expressed the social discontent of the 
time in the guise of its prevalent theological 
conceptions — now occupied the first place, 
while in the earlier movement it was merely 
sporadic. 

After the close of the sixteenth century 
Anabaptism lost all political importance on the 
continent of Europe. It had, however, a 
certain afterglow in this country during the 
following century, which lasted over the times 
of the Civil War and the Commonwealth, and 
may be traced in the movements of the 
*' Levellers," the '* Fifth Monarchy men," and 
even among the earlier Quakers. 



CHAPTER IX 

POST-MEDIEVAL GERMANY 

We have in the preceding chapters sought to 
give a general view of the social life, together 
with the inner political and economic move- 
ments, of Germany during that closing period 
of the Middle Ages which is generally known 
as the era of the Reformation. With the 
definite establishment of the Reformation and 
of the new political and economic conditions 
that came with it in many of the rising States 
of Germany, the Middle Ages may be con- 
sidered as definitely coming to an end, not- 
withstanding that, of course, a considerable 
body of mediaeval conditions of social, political, 
and economic life continued to survive all over 
Europe, and certainly not least in Germany. 

We have now to take a general and, so to 
say, panoramic view embracing three centuries 
and a half, dating from approximately the 
middle of the sixteenth century to the present 
time. Our presentation, owing to exigencies 

of space, will necessarily take the form of a 

229 



230 GERMAN CULTURE 

mere sketch of events and general tendencies, 
but a sketch that will, we hope, be sufficient 
to connect periods and to enable the reader to 
understand better than before the forces that 
have built up modern Germany and have 
moulded the national character. In this 
long period of more than three centuries 
there are two world-historic events, or rather 
series of events, which stand out in bold relief 
as the causes which have moulded Germany 
directly, and the whole of Europe indirectly, 
up to the present day. These two epoch- 
making historical factors are ( i ) the Thirty 
Years' War and (2) the Rise of the Prussian 
Monarchy. 

Owing to the success of Protestantism, 
with its two forms of Lutheranism and 
Calvinism in various German territories, the 
friction became chronic between Catholic and 
Protestant interests throughout the length and 
breadth of Central Europe. The Emperor 
himself was chosen, as we know, by three 
ecclesiastical electors, the Archbishops of Koln, 
Trier, and Mainz, and by four princes, the 
Pfalzgraf, called in English the Elector Pala- 
tine, the Markgraves of Saxony and Branden- 
burg, and the King of Bohemia. The 
princes and other potentates, owing imme- 
diate allegiance to the empire alone, were prac- 
tically independent sovereigns. The Reichstag, 



POST-MEDIEVAL GERMANY 231 

instituted in the fifteenth century, attendance 
at which was strictly limited to these immediate 
vassals of the empire, had proved of little 
effect. This was shown when in the middle 
of the sixteenth century Protestantism had 
established itself in the favour of the mass of 
the German peoples. It was vetoed by the 
Reichstag, with its powerful contingent of 
ecclesiastical members. Of course here the 
economic side of the question played a great 
part. The ecclesiastical potentates and those 
favourable to them dreaded the spread of 
Protestantism in view of the secularization of 
religious domains and fiefs. This, notwith- 
standing that there were not wanting bishops 
and abbots themselves who were not indis- 
posed, as princes of the empire, to appropriate 
the Church lands, of which they were the 
trustees, for their own personal possessions. 
After a short civil war an arrangement was 
come to at the Treaty of Passau in 1552, 
which was in the main ratified by the 
Reichstag held at Augsburg in 1555 (the so- 
called Peace of Augsburg) ; but the arrange- 
ment was artificial and proved itself untenable 
as a permanent instrument of peace. 

During the latter part of the sixteenth 
century two magnates of the empire, the Duke 
of Bavaria on the Catholic side and the 
Calvinist, Christian of Anhalt, on the Protestant, 



232 GERMAN CULTURE 



played the chief role, the Lutheran Markgrave 
of Saxony taking up a moderate position as 
mediator. Of the Reichstag of Augsburg it 
should be said that it had ignored the Calvinist 
section of the Protestant party altogether, only 
recognizing the Lutheran. In 1608 the Pro- 
testant Union, which embraced Lutherans and 
Calvinists alike, was founded under the leader- 
ship of Christian of Anhalt. It was most 
powerful in Southern Germany. This was 
countered immediately by the foundation under 
Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, of a Catholic 
League. The friction, which was now becoming 
acute, went on increasing till the actual out- 
break of the Thirty Years' War in 161 8. The 
signal for the latter was given by the Bohemian 
revolution in the spring of that year. 

The Thirty Years' War, as it is termed, which 
was really a series of wars, naturally falls into 
five distinct periods, each representing in many 
respects a separate war in itself. The first 
two years of the war (1618-20) is occupied 
with the Bohemian revolt against the attempt 
of the Emperor to force Catholicism upon the 
Bohemian people and with its immediate con- 
sequences. It was accentuated by the attempt 
of the Emperor Matthias to compel them to 
accept the Archduke Ferdinand as King. This 
attempt was countered through the election by 
the Bohemians of the Pfalzgraf, Friedrich V 



1 



POST-MEDIiEVAL GERMANY 233 

(the son-in-law of James I of England), who 
was called the Winter King from the fact that 
his reign lasted only during the winter months ; 
for though the Protestant Union, led by Count 
Thurn, had won several victories in 161 8 and 
even threatened Vienna, the Austrian power 
was saved by Tilly and the Catholic League 
which came to its rescue. Many of the 
Protestant States, moreover, were averse to 
the Palatine Friedrich's acceptance of the 
Bohemian crown. The Bohemian movement 
was ultimately crushed by a force sent from 
Spain, under the Spanish general Spinola . The 
final defeat took place at the battle of the White 
Hill, near Prague, November 8, 1620. 

The second period of the war was concerned 
with the attempt of the Catholic Powers to 
deprive Friedrich of his Palatine dominions. 
Here Count Mansfeld, with his mercenary 
army of free-lances, aided by Christian of 
Brunswick and others on the side of Friedrich 
and the Protestants, defeated Tilly in 1622. 
But later on Tilly and the Imperialists by a 
series of victories conquered the Palatinate, 
which was bestowed upon Maximilian of 
Bavaria. Mansfeld, notwithstanding that he 
had some successes later in the year 1622, 
could not effectually redeem the situation, 
Brunswick's army being entirely routed by 
Tilly in the following year at the battle of 



234 GERMAN CULTURE 

Stadtlohn, which virtually ended this particular 
campaign. 

The third period of the war, from 1624 
to 1629, is characterized by the intervention 
of the Powers outside the immediate sphere 
of German or Imperial interests. France, 
under Richelieu, became concerned at the 
growing power of the Hapsburgs, while 
James I of England began to show anxiety 
at his son-in-law's adverse fortunes, though 
without achieving any successful intervention. 
The chief feature of this campaign was the 
entry into the field of Christian IV of Den- 
mark with a powerful army to join Mansfeld 
and Christian of Brunswick in invading the 
Imperial and Austrian territories. But the 
savageries and excesses of Mansfeld's troops 
had disgusted and alienated all sides. It was 
at this time that Wallenstein, Duke of Fried- 
land, was appointed general of the Imperial 
troops, and soon after succeeded in completely 
routing Mansfeld at the battle of Dessau 
Bridge in 1626. Four months later Tilly 
completely defeated Christian IV and his Danes 
at Lutter. Wallenstein, on his side, followed 
up his success, driving Mansfeld into Hungary. 
Mansfeld, in spite of some fugitive successes 
in the Austrian dominions in the course of his 
retreat, was compelled by Wallenstein to 
evacuate Hungary, shortly after which he 



POST-MEDI.CVAL GERMANY 235 

died. The campaign ended with the Peace 
of Lubeck in 1629. 

The action of the Emperor Ferdinand in 
attempting to enforce the restitution of 
Church lands in North Germany was the 
proximate cause of the next great cam- 
paign^ which constitutes the fourth period of 
the Thirty Years' War (1630-36). The im- 
mediate occasion was, however, Wallenstein's 
seizure of certain towns in Mecklenburg, over 
which he claimed rights by Imperial grant two 
years before. This, which may be regarded 
as the greatest period of the Thirty Years' 
War, was characterized by the appearance on 
the scene of Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish 
King. He was not in time, however, to pre- 
vent the sacking of Magdeburg by the troops 
of Tilly and Poppenheim. The former, never- 
theless, was defeated by the Swedes at the 
important battle of Breitenfeld in 1631. The 
following year the Imperial army was again 
defeated on the Lach. Thereupon Gustavus 
occupied Munchen, though he was subsequently 
compelled by Wallenstein to evacuate the city. 
The last great victory of Gustavus was at 
Liitzen in i 632, at which battle the great leader 
met his death. Wallenstein, who was now in 
favour of a policy of peace and political recon- 
struction, was assassinated in 1634 with the 
connivance of the Emperor. On September 6th 



236 GERMAN CULTURE 

of the same year the Protestant army, under 
Bernhard of Saxe-V/eimar, sustained an over- 
whelming defeat at Nordlingen, and the Peace of 
Prague the following year ended the campaign. 

The fifth period, from 1636 to 1648, has, 
as its central interest, the active intervention 
of France in the Central European struggle. 
The Swedes, notwithstanding the death 
of their King, continued to have some 
notable successes, and even approached to 
within striking distance of Vienna. But 
Richelieu now became the chief arbiter of 
events. The French generals Conde and 
Turenne invaded Germany and the Nether- 
lands. Victories were won by the new armies 
at Rocroi, Thionville, and at Nordlingen, but 
Vienna was not captured. The Imperial troops 
were, however, again defeated at Zumarshauen 
by Cond6, who also repelled an attempted 
diversion in the shape of a Spanish invasion 
of France at the battle of Lens in the spring 
of 1648. The Thirty Years' War was finally 
ended in October of the same year at Miinster, 
by the celebrated Treaty of Westphalia. 

The above is a skeleton sketch in a few words 
of the chief features of that long and com- 
plicated series of diplomatic and military events 
known to history as the Thirty Years' War.^ 

^ Works on the Thirty Years' War are numerous. Many 
scholarly and exhaustive treatises on various aspects of the 



POST-MEDIEVAL GERMANY 237 

The Thirty Years' War had far-reaching and 
untold consequences on Germany itself and 
indirectly on the course of modern civilization 
generally. For close upon a generation 
Central Europe had been ravaged from end to 
end by hostile and plundering armies. Rapine 
and destruction were, for near upon a third of 
the century, the common lot of the Germanic 
peoples from north to south and from east to 
west. Populations were as helpless as sheep 
before the brutal, criminal soldiery, recruited in 
many cases from the worst elements of every 
European country. The excesses of Mans- 
feld's mercenary army in the earlier stages of 
the war created widespread horror. But the 
defeat and death of Mansfeld brought no 
alleviation. The troops of Wallenstein proved 
no better in this respect than those of Mans- 
feld. On the contrary, with every year the 
war went on its horrors increased, while every 
trace of principle in the struggle fell more 
and more into the background. Everywhere 
was ruin. 

subject are, as might be expected, to be found in German. 
For general popular reading Schiller's excellent piece of literary 
hack work (translated in Bohn's Library) may still be con- 
sulted, but perhaps the best short general history of the war 
with its entanglement of events is that by the late Professor 
S. R. Gardiner, of Oxford, which forms one of the volumes of 
Messrs. Longman, Green & Co.'s series entitled " Epochs of 
Modern History." 



238 GERMAN CULTURE 

The population became by the time the war 
had ended a mere fraction of what it was at 
the opening of the seventeenth century. Some 
idea of the state of things may be gathered 
from the instance of Augsburg, which during 
its siege by the ImperiaUsts was reduced from 
70,000 to 10,000 inhabitants. What hap- 
pened to the great commercial city of the 
Fuggers was taking pl^ce on a scale greater or 
less, according to the district, all over German 
territory. We read of towns and villages that 
were pillaged more than a dozen times in a 
year. This terrific depopulation of the country, 
the reader may well understand, had vast 
results on its civilization. The whole great 
structure of Mediaeval and Renaissance 
Germany— its literature, art, and social life- 
was in ruins. At the close of the seventeenth 
century the old German culture had gone and 
the new had not yet arisen. But of this we 
shall have more to say in the next chapter. 
For the present we are chiefly concerned to 
give a brief sketch of the second great epoch- 
making event, or rather train of events, which 
conditioned the foundation and development of 
modern Germany. We refer, of course, to the 
rise of the Prussian monarchy. 

We should premise that the Prussians are the 
least German of all the populations of what 
constitutes modern Germany. They are more 



POST-MEDI/EVAL GERMANY 239 

than half Slavs. In the early Middle Ages the 
Mark of Brandenburg, the centre and chief 
province of the modern Prussian State, was an 
outlying offshoot of the nciediaeval Holy Roman 
Empire of the German nation, surrounded by 
barbaric tribes, Slav and Teuton. The chief 
Slav people were the Borussians, from which 
the name '* Prussian " was a corruption. The 
first outstanding historic fact concerning these 
Baltic lands is that a certain Adalbert, Bishop 
of Prague, at the end of the tenth century 
went north on a mission of enterprise for con- 
verting the Prussian heathen. The neighbour- 
ing Christian prince, the Duke of Poland, who 
had presumably suffered much from incursions 
of these pagan Slavs, offered him every 
encouragement. The adventure ended, how- 
ever, before long in the death of Adalbert at 
the hands of these same pagan Slavs . 

The first indication of the existence of a 
Mark of Brandenburg with its Markgraves is 
in the eleventh century. There is, how- 
ever, little definite historical information 
concerning them. The first of these Mark- 
graves to attract attention was Albrecht 
the Bear, one of the so-called Ascanian line, 
the family hailing from the Harz Mountains. 
Albrecht was a remarkable man for his time 
in every way. Under him the Markgravate of 
Brandenburg was raised to be an electorate 



240 GERMAN CULTURE 



1 



of the empire. The Markgrave thus became 
a prince of the empire. It was Albrecht the 
Bear who first introduced a hmited measure 
of peace and order into the hitherto anarchic 
condition of the Mark and its adjacent terri- 
tories. The Ascanian line continued till 13 19, 
and was followed by a period of political 
anarchy and disturbance, until finally 
Friedrich, Count of Hohenzollern, acquired 
the electorate, and became known as the 
Elector Friedrich I. Meanwhile the Order of 
the Teutonic Knights, who earlier began their 
famous crusade against the Borussian heathens, 
had established themselves on the territories 
now known as East and West Prussia. In 
spite of this fact and of the for long time 
dominant power of their Polish neighbours, the 
Hohenzollern rulers continued to acquire in- 
creased power and fresh territories. 

At the Reformation Albrecht, a scion of the 
Hohenzollern family, who had been elected 
Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, adopted 
Protestantism and assumed the title of Duke of 
Prussia. Finally, in 1609, the then Elector 
of Brandenburg, John Sigismund, through his 
marriage with Ann, daughter and heiress of 
Albrecht Friedrich, Duke of Prussia, came into 
possession of the whole of Prussia proper, 
together with other adjacent territories. 
The Prussian lands suffered much through the 



POST-MEDIEVAL GERMANY 241 

Thirty Years' War during the reign of John 
Sigismund's successor, George Wilhelm. But 
the latter's son, Friedrich Wilhelm, the so- 
called Great Elector, succeeded by his ability 
in repairing the ravages the war had made 
and raising the electorate immensely in political 
importance. He left at his death, in 1688, 
the financial condition of the country in a 
sound state, with an effective army of 38,000 
men. Friedrich I, who followed him, held 
matters together and got Prussia promoted to 
the rank of a kingdom in 1701. His son, 
Friedrich Wilhelm I, by rigid economies suc- 
ceeded in raising the financial condition of the 
kingdom to a still higher level. The military 
power of the monarchy he also developed con- 
siderably, and is famous in history for his 
mania for tall soldiers. 

We now come to the real founder of the 
Prussian monarchy as a great European Power, 
Friedrich Wilhelm I's son, who succeeded his 
father in 1740 as Friedrich H, and who is 
known to history as Friedrich the Great. 

Friedrich no sooner came to the throne than 
he started on an aggressive expansionist policy 
for Prussia. The opportunity presented itself 
a few months after his accession by the dis- 
pute as to the Pragmatic Sanction and Maria 
Theresa's right to the throne of Austria. In 

the two wars which immediately followed, the 

16 



242 GERMAN CULTURE 

Prussian army overran the whole of Silesia, 
and the peace of 1745 left the Prussian King 
in possession of the entire country. East 
Friesland had already been absorbed the 
year before on the death of the last Duke 
without issue. In spite of the exhaustion of 
men and money in the two Silesian wars, 
Friedrich found himself ready with both men 
and money eleven years later, in 1756, to 
embark upon what is known as the Seven 
Years' War. Though without acquiring fresh 
territory by this war, the gain in prestige 
was so great that the Prussian monarchy 
virtually assumed the hegemony of North 
Germany, becoming the rival of Austria for 
the domination of Central Europe, the 
position in which it remained for more than 
a century afterwards. Nevertheless, after 
this succession of wars the condition of the 
country was deplorable. It was obvious that 
the first thing to do was the work of internal 
resuscitation. The extraordinary ability and 
energy of the King saved the internal situa- 
tion. Agriculture, industry, and commerce 
were re-established and reorganized. It was 
now that the cast-iron system of bureaucratic 
administration, where not actually created, was 
placed on a firm foundation. But in external 
affairs Prussia continued to earn its character 
as the robber State of Europe par excellence. 



POST-MEDI^VAL GERMANY 243 

In 1772 Friedrich joined with Austria in the 
first partition of Poland, acquiring the whole 
of West Prussia as his share. A few years 
later Friedrich formed an anti -Austrian league 
of German princes, under Prussian leadership, 
which was the first overt sig^ of the conflict 
for supremacy in Germany between Prussia 
and Austria, which lasted for wellnigh a 
century. By the time of his death — August 7, 
1786 — Friedrich had increased Prussian terri- 
tory to nearly 75,000 square miles and between 
five and six millions of population. 

Under Friedrich's nephew, Friedrich 
Wilhelm II, while the rigour of bureau- 
cratic administration, controlled by a mon- 
archical absolutism, continued and was even 
accentuated, the absence of the able hand 
of Friedrich the Great soon made itself ap- 
parent. As regards external policy, however, 
Prussia, while allowing territories on the left 
bank of the Rhine to go to France, eagerly 
saw to the increase of her own dominions in 
the east to the extent of nearly doubling her 
superficial area by her participation in the 
second and third partitions of Poland, which 
took place in 1783 and 1795 respectively. 
These external successes, or rather acts of 
spoliation, were, notwithstanding, counter- 
balanced at home by a degieneracy alike of the 
civil bureaucracy and of the army. The 



244 GERMAN CULTURE 

country internally, both as regards morale and 
effectiveness, had sunk far below its level under 
Friedrich the Great . This showed itself during 
the great Napoleonic wars, when Prussia had to 
undergo more than one humiliation at the hands 
of Buonaparte, culminating in October 1806 
with the collapse of the Prussian armies at 
Jena and Auerstadt. The entry of Napoleon 
in triumph into Berlin followed. At the Peace 
of Tilsit, in 1807, Friedrich -Wilhelm had to 
sign away half his kingdom and to consent 
to the payment of a heavy war indemnity, 
pending which the French troops occupied the 
most important fortresses in the country. 

Following upon this moment of deepest 
national humiliation comes the period of the 
Ministers Stein and Hardenberg, of the enthu- 
siastic adjurations to patriotism of Fischer and 
others, and of the activity of the ** League of 
Virtue " {Tugendbund). It is difficult to under- 
stand the enthusiasm that could be aroused for 
the rehabilitation of an absolutist, bureaucratic, 
and militarist State, such as Prussia was — a 
State in which civil and political liberty was 
conspicuous by its absence. But the fact un- 
doubtedly remains that the men in question 
did succeed in pumping up a strong patriotic 
feeling and desire to free the country from 
the yoke of the foreigner, even if that only 
meant increased domestic tyranny. It must be 



POST.MEDI.EVAL GERMANY 245 

admitted, however, that as a matter of fact not 
inconsiderable internal reforms were owing to 
the leading men of this time. Stein abolished 
serfdom, and in some respects did away with 
the legal distinction of classes, thereby paving 
the way for the rise of the middle class, which 
at that time meant a progressive step. He also 
conferred rights of self-government uponmmiici- 
palities. Hardenberg inaugurated measures 
intended to ameliorate the condition of the 
peasants, while Wilhelm von Humboldt estab- 
lished the thorough if somewhat mechanical 
education system which was subsequently ex- 
tended throughout Germany. He also helped 
to found the University of Berlin in 1809. 

But at the same time the curse of Prussia — 
militarism — was riveted on the people through 
the reorganization of the Prussian army by those 
two able military bureaucrats, Scharnhorst and 
Gneisenau. In 18 13 Prussia concluded at 
Kalicsh an alliance with Russia, which Austria 
joined. In the war which followed Prussia 
was severely strained by losses in men and 
money. But at the Congress of Vienna the 
Prussian kingdom received back nearly, but 
not quite, all it lost in 1807. The acquire- 
ment, however, of new and valuable territories 
in Westphalia and along the Rhine, besides 
Thuringia and the province of Saxony, more 
than compensated for the loss of certain Slav 



246 GERMAN CULTURE 

districts in the east, as thereby the way was 
prepared for the uhimate despotism of the 
Prussian King over all Germany. The success 
of Prussian diplomacy in enslaving these erst- 
while independent German lands in i 8 i 5 was 
crucial for the subsequent direction of Prussian 
policy. 

It is time now to return once more to the" 
internal conditions in the Prussian State now 
dominant over a large part of Northern Ger- 
many. A Constitution had been more than once 
talked of, but the despotism with its bureau- 
cratic machinery had remained. Now, after the 
conclusion of the Napoleonic wars and the re- 
drawing of the Prussian frontier lines by the 
peace of i 8 i 5, the matter assumed an urgency 
it had not had before. Following upon 
proclamations and promises, a patent was 
addressed to the new Saxon provinces granting 
a national Landtag, or Diet, for the whole 
country. The drawing up of the Constitution 
thus proclaimed in principle gave rise to heated 
conflicts. There was, as yet, no proletariat 
proper in Prussia, and for that matter hardly 
any in the rest of Germany. The handicraft 
system of production, and even the mediaeval 
guild system, slightly modified, prevailed 
throughout the country. The middle class 
proper was small and unimportant, and hence 
Liberalism, the theoretical expression of that 



POST-MEDIEVAL GERMANY 247 

class, only found articulate utterance through 
men of the professions. 

The new Prussian territories in the west 
were largely tinctured with progressive ideas 
originating in the French Revolution, while 
the east was dominated by reactionary 
feudal landowners, the notorious Junker 
class — a class special to East Prussian 
territories, including the eastern portion 
of the Mark of Brandenburg — whom the 
moderate Conservative Minister Stein him- 
self characterized as '' heartless, wooden, half- 
educated people, only good to turn into 
corporals or calculating-machines." This class 
then, as ever since, opposed an increase 
of popular control and the progress of free 
institutions with might and main. Friction 
arose between the Government and Liberal 
gymnastic societies and students' clubs. This 
culminated in the festival on the Wartburg in 
October 18 18, when a bonfire was made of 
a book of police laws and Uhlan stays and a 
corporal's stick. It was followed the next 
year by the assassination of the dramatist and 
political spy Kotzebue by the student Sand. 

Panic seized the reactionists, and the 
Austrian Minister Metternich, one of the 
chief pillars of absolutist principles in 
Europe, induced the King to commit him- 
self to the Austrian system of repression. 



248 GERMAN CULTURE 

In 1 82 1 the Reactionary party succeeded 
in getting the projected Constitution aban- 
doned and the bureaucratic system of provincial 
estates estabHshed by royal warrant two years 
later (1823). The Prussian police with their 
spies then became omnipotent, and a remorse- 
less persecution of all holding Liberal or demo- 
cratic views ensued, the best-known writers 
on the popular side no less than the rank 
and file being arbitrarily arrested and kept 
in prison on any or no pretext. The 
amalgamation of the new districts into the 
Prussian bureaucratic system was not accom- 
plished without resistance. The Rhine pro- 
vinces especially, accustomed to easy-going 
government and light taxation under the old 
ecclesiastical princes, kicked vigorously against 
the Prussian jack-boot. The discontent was 
so widespread indeed that some concessions 
had to be made, such as the retention of the 
Code Napoleon. What created most resent- 
ment, however, was the enactment of 1 8 1 4, 
which enforced compulsory universal military 
service throughout the monarchy. Friedrich 
Wilhelm also undertook to dragoon his subjects 
in the matter of religion, amalgamating the 
Lutherans with other reformed bodies, under 
the name of the '' Evangelical Church." 

In foreign politics, in the earlier part of 
the nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic 



POST-MEDIEVAL GERMANY 249 

wars^ Prussia, as yet hardly recovered from her 
defeats under Buonaparte, almost entirely fol- 
lowed the lead of Austria. But perhaps the 
most important measure of the Prussian 
Government at this time was the foundation 
of the famous Zollverein or Customs Union 
of various North German States in 1834. The 
far-reaching character of this measure was only 
shown later, being, in fact, the means and 
basis by and on which the political and mili- 
tary ascendancy of Prussia over all Germany 
was assured. Friedrich Wilhelm III, who died 
on June 7, 1840, was succeeded by his son, 
Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The new reign began 
with an appearance of Liberalism by a general 
amnesty for political offences. Reaction, how- 
ever, soon raised its head again, and Friedrich 
Wilhelm IV, in spite of his varnish of philo- 
sophical and literary tastes, was soon seen to 
be au fond as reactionary as his predecessors. 
The conflict between the reaction of the 
Government and the now widely spread 
Liberal and democratic aspirations of the 
people resulted in Prussia (as it did under 
similar circumstances in other countries) in the 
outbreak of the revolution of 1848. 

It is necessary at this stage to take a brief 
survey of the political history of the Germanic 
States of Europe generally from the time of 
the Peace of Vienna, in 1 8 1 5, onwards, in 



2SO GERMAN CULTURE 

order to understand fully the role played by 
the Prussian monarchy in German history since 
1848 ; for from this time the history of Prussia 
becomes more and more bound up with that 
of the German peoples as a whole. During 
the Napoleonic wars Germany, as every one 
knows, was, generally speaking, in the grip 
of the French Imperial power. To follow the 
vicissitudes and fluctuations of fortune through- 
out Central Europe during these years lies out- 
side our present purpose. We are here chiefly 
concerned with the political development from 
the Treaty of Vienna, as signed on June 9, 
181 5, onward. The Treaty of Vienna com- 
pleted the work begun by Napoleon — repre- 
sented by the extinction of thte mediaeval '' Holy 
Roman Empire of the German nation " in 
1806 — in making an end of the political con- 
figuration of the German peoples which had 
grown up during the Middle Ages and survived, 
in a more or less decayed condition, since the 
Peace of Westphalia, which concluded the 
Thirty Years' War. The three hundred separate 
States of which Germany had originally con-| 
sisted were now reduced to thirty -nine, a 
number which, by the extinction of sundry] 
minor governing lines, was before long further' 
reduced to thirty-five. These States constituted! 
themselves into a new German Confederation,] 
with a Federal Assembly, meeting at Frankfurt- 



POST-MEDI^VAL GERMANY 251 

on-the-Main. The new Federal Council, or 
Assembly, however, soon revealed itself as but 
the tool of the princes and a bulwark of reaction. 

The revolution of 1848 was throughout 
Germany an expression of popular discontent 
and of democratic and even, to a large ex- 
tent, of republican aspirations. The princely 
authorities endeavoured to stem the wave of 
popular indignation and revolutionary enthu- 
siasm by recognizing a provisional self -consti- 
tuted body, and sanctioning the election of a 
national representative Parliament at Frank- 
furt in place of the effete Federal Council. 
The Archduke of Austria, who was elected 
head of the new, hastily organized National 
Government, was not slow to use his newly 
acquired power in the interests of re- 
action, thereby exciting the hostility of all the 
progressive elements in the Parliament of 
Frankfurt. When after some months it became 
obvious that the anti -Progressive parties had 
gained the upper hand alike in Austria and 
Prussia, the friction between the Democratic 
and Constitutional parties became increasingly 
bitter. 

The Prussian Government meanwhile took 
advantage of the state of affairs to stir up 
the Schleswig-Holstein question, so-called, 
driving the Danes out of Schleswig, an insur- 
rectionary movement in Holstein having been 



252 GERMAN CULTURE 

already suppressed by the Danish King. 
Prussia, alarmed by the attitude of the Powers, 
agreed to withdraw her troops from the occu- 
pied territories without consulting the Frank- 
furt Parliament, an act which involved 
Friedrich Wilhelm in conflict with the latter. 
The issues arising out of this dispute made it 
plain to every one that the Parliament of all 
Germany was impotent to enforce its decrees 
against one of the German Powers possessed 
of a preponderating military strength. By the 
end of 1848 the revolution in Vienna was com- 
pletely crushed and a strongly reactionary 
Government appointed by the new Emperor. 
Meanwhile in Berlin the Junkers and the 
reactionaries generally had already again come 
into power, a crisis having been caused by 
the attempt of the democratic section of the 
Prussian National Assembly, convened by the 
King in March, to reorganize the army on a 
popular democratic basis. We need scarcely 
say the Prussian army has been the tool of 
Junkerdom and reaction ever since. 

The last despairing attempt of the Frank- 
furt Parliament to give effect to the national 
Germanic unity, which all patriotic Germans 
professed to be eager for, was the offer of the 
Imperial crown to the King of Prussia. Against 
this act, however, nearly half the members — 
i.e. all the advanced parties in the Assembly — 



' 



POST-MEDIiEVAL GERMANY 253 

protested by refusing to take any part in jt. 
They had also dechned to be associated with 
a previous motion for the exclusion of 
German Austria from the new national unity, 
in the interest of Prussian ascendancy. Both 
these reactionary proposals, as we all know, 
at a later date became the corner-stones of 
the new Prusso -German unity of Bismarck's 
creation. On this occasion, however, the 
Prussian King refused to accept the office at 
the hands of the impotent Frankfurt Assembly, 
which latter soon afterwards broke up and 
eventually " petered out." Meanwhile Prussian 
troops, led by the reactionary military caste, 
were employed in the congenial task of sup- 
pressing popular movements with the sword 
in Baden, Saxony, and Prussia itself. 

The two rival bulwarks of reaction, Prussia 
and Austria, were now so alarmed at the 
revolutionary dangers they had passed through 
that, for the nonce forgetting their rivalry, they 
cordially joined together in reviving, in the 
interests of the counter-revolution, the old 
reactionary Federal Assembly, which had never 
been formally dissolved, as it ought to have 
been on the election of the Frankfurt Parlia- 
ment. Reaction now went on apace. Liberties 
were curtailed and rights gained in 1848 were 
abolished in most of the smaller States. 
Henceforth the Federal Assembly became the 



2S4 GERMAN CULTURE 

theatre of the two great rival powers of the 
Germanic Confederation. Both alike strove 
desperately for the hegemony of Germany. 
The strength of Prussia, of course, lay 
generally in the north, that of Austria in 
the south. Austria had the advantage of 
Prussia in the matter of prestige. Prussia, on 
the other hand, had the pull of Austria in the 
possession of the machinery of the Customs 
Union. In general, however, the dual control 
of the Germanic Confederation was grudgingly 
recognized by either party, and on occasion 
they acted together. This was notably the case 
in the Schleswig-Holstein question, which had 
been smouldering ever since 1848, and which 
came to a crisis in the Danish war of 1864, 
in which Austria and Prussia jointly took part. 
Among the most reactionary of the Junker 
party in the Prussian Parliament of 1848 was 
one Count Otto Bismarck von Schonhausen, 
subsequently known to history as Prince Bis- 
marck (1815-98). This man strenuously 
opposed the acceptance of the Imperial 
dignity by the King of Prussia at the hands 
of the Frankfurt Parliament in 1849, ^^ the 
ground that it was unworthy of the King of 
Prussia to accept any office at the hands of 
the people rather than at those of his peers, 
the princes of Germany. In 185 i Count von 
Bismarck was appointed a Prussian representa- 



POST-MEDIEVAL GERMANY 255 

tive in the revived princely and aristocratic 
Federal Assembly. Here he energetically 
fought the hegemony hitherto exercised by 
Austria. He continued some years in this 
capacity, and subsequently served as Prussian 
Minister in St. Petersburg and again in Paris. 
In the autumn of 1862 the new King of 
Prussia, Wilhelm I, who had succeeded to the 
throne the previous year, called him back to 
take over the portfolio of Foreign Affairs and 
the leadership of the Cabinet. Shortly after 
his accession to power he arbitrarily closed 
the Chambers for refusing to sanction his Army 
Bill. His army scheme was then forced 
through by the royal fiat alone. On the re- 
opening of the Schleswig-Holstein question, 
owing to the death of the King of Denmark, 
German nationalist sentiment was aroused, 
which Bismarck knew how to use for the 
aggrandisement of Prussia. The Danish war, 
in which the two leading German States col- 
laborated and which ended in their favour, had 
as its result a disagreement of a serious nature 
between these rival, though mutually victorious. 
Powers . 

In all these events the hand of Bismarck was 
to be seen. He it was who dominated com- 
pletely Prussian policy from 1862 onwards. 
Full of his schemes for the agigrandisement of 
Prussia at the expense of Austria, he stirred up 



256 GERMAN CULTURE 

and worked this quarrel for all it was worthj 
the upshot being the Prusso -Austrian War (th^ 
so-called Seven Weeks' War) of the summei 
of 1866. The war was brought about by the 
arbitrary dissolution of the German Confedera- 
tion — i.e. the Federal Assembly — in which, 
owing to the alarm created by Prussian inso- 
lence and aggression, Austria had the backing 
of the majority of the States. This step was 
followed by Bismarck's dispatching an ulti- 
matum to Hanover, Saxony, and Hesse Cassel 
respectively, all of which had voted against 
Prussia in the Federal Assembly, followed, on 
its non-acceptance, by the dispatch of Prussian 
troops to occupy the States in question. Hard 
on this act of brutal violence came the declara- 
tion of war with Austria. 

At Koniggratz the Prussian army was 
victorious over the Austrians, and henceforth 
the hegemony of Central Europe was decided 
in favour of Prussia. Austria, under the 
Treaty of Prague (August 20, 1866), was 
completely excluded from the new organi- 
zation of German States, in which Prussia 
— i.e. Bismarck — was to have a free hand. 
The result was the foundation of the 
North German Confederation, under the 
leadership of Prussia. It was to have a 
common Parliament, elected by universal 
suffrage and meeting in Berlin. The army. 



POST-MEDIEVAL GERMANY 257 

the diplomatic representation, the control of 
the postal and telegraphic services, were to be 
under the sole control of the Prussian Govern- 
ment. The North German Confederation com- 
prised the northern and central States of 
Germany. The southern States — Bavaria, 
Baden, Wurtemberg, etc. — although not in- 
cluded, had been forced into a practical alliance 
with Prussia by treaties. The Customs Union 
was extended until it embraced nearly the whole 
of Germany. Prussian aggression in Luxem- 
burg produced a crisis with France in 1867, 
though the growing tension between Prussia 
and France was tided over on this occasion. 
But Bismarck only bided his time. 

The occasion was furnished him by the 
question of the succession to the Spanish 
throne, in July 1870. By means of a 
falsified telegram Bismarck precipitated war, 
in which Prussia was joined by all the 
States of Germany. The subsequent course 
of events is matter of recent history. 
The establishment of the new Prusso -German 
empire by the crowning of Wilhelm I at 
Versailles, with the empire made hereditary 
in the HoTienzollern family, completed the work 
of Bismarck and the setting of the Prussian 
jack -boot on the necks of the German peoples. 
The Prussian military and bureaucratic systems 
were now extended to all Germany — in other 

17 



258 GERMAN CULTURE 

words, the rest of the German peoples were 
made virtually the vassals and slaves of the 
Prussian monarch. This time the King of 
Prussia received the Imperial crown at the 
hands of the kings, princes, and other here- 
ditary rulers of the various German States. 
Bismarck was graciously pleased to bestow 
unity and internal peace — a Prussian peace— 
upon Germany on condition of its abasement 
before the Prussian corporal's stick and police- 
truncheon. Such was the united Germany of 
Bistnarck. Germany meant for Bismarck and 
his followers Prussia, and Prussia meant their 
own Junker and military caste, under the titular 
headship of the HohenzoUern . 

Yet, strange to say, the peoples of Germany 
willingly consented, under the influence of the 
intoxication of a successful war, to have their 
independence bartered away to Prussia by their 
rulers. In this united Germany of Bismarck — 
a Germany united under Prussian despotism — 
they naively saw the realization of the dream 
of their thinkers and poets since the time 
of the Napoleonic wars— which had become 
more than ever an inspiration from 1848 
onwards— of an ideal unity of all German - 
speaking peoples as a national whole. It 
is unquestionable that many of these thinkers 
and poets would have been horrified at the 
Prusso-Bismarckian ** unity " of '' blood and 



POST-MEDIEVAL GERMANY 259 

I 
iron.'* It was not for this, they would have 

said, that they had laboured and suffered. 

As a conclusion to the present chapter I 
venture to give a short summary of the internal, 
and especially of the economic, development 
of Prussia since the Franco-German War from 
an article which appeared in the English 
Review for December 19 14, by Mr. H. M. 
Hyndman and the present writer : — 

*' From 187 I onwards Prussianized Germany, 
by far the best-educated, and industrially and 
commercially the most progressive, country in 
Europe, with the enormous advantage of her 
central position, was, consciously and uncon- 
sciously, making ready for her next advance. 
The policy of a good understanding with 
Russia, maintained for many years, to such 
an extent that, in foreign affairs, Berlin and 
St. Petersburg were almost one city, enabled 
Germany to feel secure against France, while 
she was devoting herself to the extension of 
her rural and urban powers of production. 
Never at any time did she neglect to keep 
her army in a posture of offence. All can 
now see the meaning of this. 

** Militarism is in no sense necessarily 
economic. But the strength of Germany for 
war was rapidly increased by her success in 
peace. From the date of the great financial 
crisis of 1874, ^^d the consequent reorgani- 



26o GERMAN CULTURE 



^ 



zation of her entire banking system, Germany 
entered upon that determined and well- 
thought-out attempt to attain pre-eminence 
in the trade and commerce of the world of 
which we have not yet seen the end. From 
1878, when the German High Commissioner, 
von Rouleaux, stigmatized the exhibits of his 
countrymen as ' cheap and nasty/ special 
efforts were made to use the excellent educa- 
tion and admirable powers of organization of 
Germany in this field. The Government 
rendered official and financial help in both 
agriculture and manufacture. Scientific train- 
ing, good and cheap before, was made cheaper 
and better each year. Railways were used 
not to foster foreign competition, as in Great 
Britain, by excessive rates of home freight, 
but to give the greatest possible advantage to 
German industry in every department. In 
more than one rural district the railways were 
worked at an apparent loss in order to foster 
home production, from which the nation de- 
rived far greater advantage than such apparent 
sacrifice entailed. The same system of State 
help was extended to shipping until the great 
German liners, one of which, indeed, was 
actually subsidized by England, were more 
than holding their own with the oldest and 
most celebrated British companies. 

** Protection, alike in agriculture and in 



POST-MEDI^VAL GERMANY 261 

manufacture, bound the whole empire together 
in essentially Imperial bonds. Right or wrong 
in theory— which it is not here necessary to 
discuss — there can be no doubt whatever that 
this policy entirely changed the face of 
Germany, and rendered her our most formid- 
able competitor in every market. Emigration, 
which had been proceeding on a vast scale, 
almost entirely ceased. The savings banks 
were overflowing with deposits. The position 
of the workers was greatly improved. Not 
only were German Colonies secured in Africa 
and Asia, which were more trouble than they 
were worth, but very profitable commerce with 
our own Colonies and Dependencies was grow- 
ing by leaps and bounds, at the expense pi 
the out-of-date but self-satisfied commercialists 
of Old England. Hence arose a trade rivalry, 
against which we could not hope to contend 
successfully in the long run, except by a com- 
plete revolution in our methods of education 
and business, to which neither the Government 
nor the dominant class would consent. 

'* This remarkable advance in Germany, 
also, was accompanied by the establishment 
of a system of banking, specially directed to 
the expansion of national industry and com- 
merce, a system which was clever enough to 
use French accumulations, borrowed at a low 
rate of interest, through the German Jews who 



262 GERMAN CULTURE 

so largely controlled French financial institu- 
tions, in order still further to extend their own 
trade. It was an admirably organized attempt 
to conquer the world-market for commodities, 
in which the Government, the banks, the 
manufacturers and the shipowners all worked 
for the common cause. Meanwhile, both 
French and English financiers carefully played 
the game of their business opponents, and the 
great English banks devoted their attention 
chiefly to fostering speculation on the Stock 
Exchange — a policy of which the Germans took 
advantage, just before the outbreak of war, 
to an extent not by any means as yet fully 
understood. 

*' Thus, at the beginning of the present year, 
in spite of the withdrawal, since the Agadir 
affair, of very large amounts of French capital 
from the German market, Germany had 
attained to such a position that only the 
United States stood on a higher plane in regard 
to its future in the world of competitive com- 
merce. And this great and increasing 
economic strength was, for war purposes, 
at the disposal of the Prussian militarists, if 
they succeeded in getting the upper hand in 
politics and foreign affairs.'' 



CHAPTER X 

MODERN GERMAN CULTURE 

It is important to distinguish between the 
meaning of the German term " Kuhur " and 
that commonly expressed in EngUsh by the 
word *' culture." The word " Kultur " in 
modern German is simply equivalent to our 

p word *' civilization/' whereas the word 
" culture " in English has a special mean- 
ing, to wit, that of intellectual attainmtents. 
In this chapter we are chiefly concerned with 
the latter sense of the word. 

Germany had a rich popular literature 
during the Middle Ages from the redaction 
of the Nibelungenlied under Charles the 
Great onwards. Prominent among this popu- 
lar literature were the love-songs of the 
Minnesingers, the epics drawn from mediaeval 
traditionary versions of the legend of Troy, 
of the career of Alexander the Great, and, 

K to come to more recent times, to legends of 
Charles the Great and his Court, of Arthur and 
the Holy Grail, the Nibelungenlied in its 



263 



I 



264 GERMAN CULTURE 

present form, and Gadrun. The ** beast-epic/' 
as it was called, was also a favourite theme, 
especially in the form of Reynard ike Fox. 
In another branch of literature we have col- 
lections of laws dating from the thirteenth 
century and known respectively from the 
country of their origin as the Sachsenspiegel 
and the Schwabenspiegel. Again, at a later 
date, followed the productions of the Meister- 
singers, and especially of Hans Sachs, of 
Niimberg. Then, again, we have the prose 
literature of the mystics, Eckhart, Tauler, and 
their followers. 

Towards the close of the mediaeval period 
we find an immense number of national ballads, 
of chap-books, not to mention the Passion Plays 
or the polemical theological writings of the 
time leading up to the Reformation. Luther's 
works, more especially his translation of the 
Bible, powerfully helped to fix German as a 
literary language. The Reformation period, 
as we have seen in an earlier chapter, was 
rich in prose literature of every description — 
in fact, the output of serious German writing 
continued unabated until well into the seven- 
teenth century. But the Thirty Years' War, 
which devastated Germany from end to end, 
completely swept away the earlier literary 
culture of the nation. In fact, the event in 
question forms a dividing line between the 



MODERN GERMAN CULTURE 265 

earlier and the modern culture of Germany. 
In prose literature, the latter half of the seven- 
teenth century, Germany has only one work to 
show, though that is indeed a remarkable one — 
namely, Grimmelshausen's SlmplicissimuSy a 
romantic fiction under the guise of an auto- 
biography of wild and weird adventure for 
the most part concerned with the Thirty Years' 
War. 

The rebirth of German literature in its 
modern form began early in the eighteenth 
century. Leibnitz wrote in Latin and French, 
and his culture was mainly French. His 
follower, Christian Wolf, however, first used 
the German language for philosophical writing. 
But in poetry, Klopstock and Wieland, and, 
in serious prose, Lessing and Herder, led the 
way to the great period of German literature. 
In this period the name of Goethe holds the 
field, alike in prose and poetry. Goethe was 
born in 1749, ^^^ hence it was the last quarter 
of the century which saw him reach his zenith. 
Next to Goethe comes his younger contem- 
porary, Schiller. It is impossible here to go 
even briefly into the achievements of the 
bearers of these great names. They may be 
truly regarded in many important respects as 
the founders of modern German culture. 
Around them sprang up a whole galaxy of 
smaller men, and the close of the eighteenth 



L 



266 GERMAN CULTURE 

century showed a literary activity in Germany 
exceeding any that had gone before. 

Turning to philosophy, it is enough to men- 
tion the immortal name of Immanuel Kant as 
the founder of modern German philosophic 
thought and the first of a line of eminent 
thinkers extending to wellnigh the middle of 
the nineteenth century. The names of Fichte, 
Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and others will 
at once occur to the reader. 

Contemporaneously with the great rise of 
modern German literature there was a 
unique development in music, beginning 
with Sebastian Bach and continuing through 
the great classical school, the leading names in 
which are Gliick, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, 
Mendelssohn, Schubert, etc. The middle 
period of the nineteenth century showed a 
further development in prose literature, pro- 
ducing some of the greatest historians and 
critics the world has seen. At this time, too, 
Germany began to take the lead in science. 
The names of Virchow, Helmholtz, Hackel, out 
of a score of others, all of the first rank, 
are familiar to every person of education in 
the present and past generation. The same 
period has been signalized by the great post- 
classical development in music, as illustrated by 
the works of Schumann, Brahms, and, above 
all, by the towering fame of Richard Wagner. 



1 



MODERN GERMAN CULTURE 267 

From the last quarter of the eighteenth 
century onwards it may truly be said of 
Germany that education is not only more 
generally diffused than in any other country of 
Europe, but (as a recent writer has expressed 
it) ** is cultivated with an earnest and systematic 
devotion not met with to an equal extent among 
other nations." The present writer can well 
remember some years ago, when at the rail- 
way station at Breisach (Baden) waiting one 
evening for the last train to take him to Colmar, 
he seated himself at the table of the small 
station restaurant at which three tradesmen, 
** the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick- 
maker " of the place were drinking their beer. 
Broaching to them the subject of the history of 
the town, he found the butcher quite prepared 
to discuss with the baker and the candlestick- 
maker the policy of Charles the Bold and 
Louis XI as regards the possession of the 
district, as though it might have been a 
matter of last night's debate in the House or 
of the latest horse-race. Where would you find 
this popular culture in any other country? 

Germany possesses 20 universities, 16 poly- 
technic educational institutes, about 800 higher 
schools (gymnasia), and nearly 60,000 elemen- 
tary schools. Every town of any importance 
throughout the German States is liberally 
provided in the matter of libraries, museums, 



268 GERMAN CULTURE 

and art collections, while its special institutions, 
music schools, etc., are famous throughout the 
world. The German theatre is well known for 
its thoroughness. Every, even moderately 
sized, German town has its theatre, which in- 
cludes also opera, in which a high scale of 
all-round artistic excellence is attained, hardly 
equalled in any other country. In fact, it is 
not too much to say that for long Germany 
was foremost in the vanguard of educational, 
intellectual, and artistic progress. 

That the above is an over-coloured statement 
as regards the importance of Germany for well- 
nigh a century and a half past in the history 
of human culture, in the sense of intellectual 
progress in its widest meaning, I venture to 
think that no one competent to judge will 
allege. Is then, it may be asked, the railii^g 
of public opinion and the Press of Great 
Britain and other countries outside Germany 
and Austria, against the Germany of the 
present day, and the jeers at the term' 
** German culture '' wholly unjustified and the 
result of national or anti-German prejudice? 
That there has been much foolish vituperative 
abuse of the whole German nation and of 
everything German indiscriminately in the 
Press of this and some other countries is un- 
doubtedly true. But, however, our acknow- 
ledgment of this fact will not justify us in 



MODERN GERMAN CULTURE 269 

refusing to recognize the truth which finds 
expression in what very often looks like mere 
foolish vilification. 

The truth in question will be apparent 
on a consideration of the change that has 
come over the German people and Gernian 
culture since the war of 1870 and the foun- 
dation of the modern German Empire. The 
material and economic side of this change has 
been already indicated in a short summary in 
the quotation which closes the last chapter. 
But these changes, or advances if you will, 
on the material side, have been accompanied 
by a moral and material degeneration which 
has been only very partially counteracted at 
present by a movement which, though initiated 
before the period named, has only attained its 
great development, and hence influenced the 
national character, since the date in question. 

It is a striking fact that in the last 
forty-four years — the period of the new German 
Empire— there has been a dearth of originality 
in all directions. In the earlier part of the 
period in question the survivors from the pre- 
Imperial time continued their work in their 
several departments, but no new men of the 
same rank as themselves have arisen, either 
alongside of them or later to take their places. 
The one or two that might be adduced as 
partial exceptions to what has been above said 



270 GERMAN CULTURE 

only prove the rule. We have had, it is true, 
a multitude of men, more or less clever epigoniy 
but little else. Again, it is, I think, impossible 
to deny that a mechanical hardness and 
brutality have come over the national character 
which entirely belie its former traits. It is a 
matter of common observation that in the last 
generation the German middle class has become 
noticeably coarsened, vulgarized, and blatant. 

Again, although I am very far from 
wishing to attribute the crimes and horrors 
committed by the German army during the 
present war to the whole German nation, or 
even to the rank and file of those composing; 
the army, yet there is no doubt that some 
blame must be apportioned at least to the latter. 
The contrast is striking between the conduct of 
the German troops during the present war and 
that of 1870, when they could declare that 
they were out '* to fight French soldiers and 
not French citizens." Such were the military 
ethics of bygone generations of German 
soldiers. They certainly do not apply to the 
German army of to-day. The popularity of 
such writers as Von Treitschke and Bernhardi, 
respecting which so much has been written, 
is indeed significant of a vast change in 
German moral conceptions. The practical in- 
fluence of Nietzsche, who— with his corybantic 
whirl of criticism on all things in heaven above 



MODERN GERMAN CULTURE 271 

and on the earth beneath, a criticism not always 
coherent with itself— can hardly be termed a 
German Chauvinist in any intelligible sense, 
has, I think, been much exaggerated. The 
importance of his theories, considered as an 
ingredient in modern German Chauvinism, is 
not so considerable, I should imagine, as is 
sometimes thought. 

We come now to the movement already 
alluded to as a set-off and, within certain 
boundaries at least, a counteractive of the de- 
generacy exhibited in the German character 
since the foundation of the present Imperial 
system. The rise and rapid growth of the 
Social Democratic movement is perhaps the 
most striking fact in the recent history of 
Germany. The same may be said, of course, 
of the growth of Socialism everywhere during 
the same period. But in Germany it has for 
a generation past, or even more, occupied an 
exceptional position, alike as regards the 
rapidity of its increase, its direct influence on 
the masses, and its party organization. Modern 
Socialism, as a party doctrine, is, moreover, a 
product of the best period of nineteenth -century 
German thought and literature. Its three 
great theoretical protagonists, Marx, Engels, 
and their younger contemporary, Lassalle, all 
issued from the great Hegelian movement 
of the first half of the nineteenth century. 



272 GERMAN CULTURE 

Their propagandist activity, literary and other- 
wise, was in the German language. The 
analysis of the present capitalist system, form- 
ing the foundation of the demand for the 
communization of the means of production, 
distribution, and exchange, as resulting in a 
human society as opposed to a class society, 
and ultimately in the extinction of national 
harriers in a world-federation of socialized 
humanity — these principles were first appre- 
ciated, as a world-ideal, by the proletariat of 
Germany, and they have unquestionably raised 
that proletariat to an intellectual rank as yet 
equalled by no other working-class in the 
world. 

It must be admitted, however, that with the 
colossal growth of the Social Democratic party 
in Germany in numbers and the introduction 
into it of elements from various quarters, 
a certain deterioration, one may hope and 
believe only temporary, has become apparent 
in its quality. This appHes, at least, to certain 
sections of the party. A sordid practicalism 
has made itself felt, due to a feverish desire 
to play an important role in the detail of current 
politics. Personal ambition and the mechanical 
working of the party system have also had 
their evil influence in the movement in recent 
years. Nevertheless, we have reason to believe 
that the core of the party is as sound and as 



MODERN GERMAN CULTURE 273 

true to principle as ever it was, and that on 
the restoration of international peace this will 
be seen to be the case. What interests us, 
however, specially, at the moment of writing, 
is the lamentable, yet undeniable, fact that 
German Social Democracy has, on this occa- 
sion, disastrously failed to prevent the out- 
break of war, notwithstanding the vigour of 
its efforts to do so during the last week of 
July ; and still more that it has failed up to 
date to stem the rising flood of militarism and 
jingoism in the German people. That before 
many months are over the scales will fall from 
the eyes of the masses of Germany I am con- 
vinced, and not less that a revolutionary move- 
ment in Germany will be one of the signs that 
will herald the dawn of a better day for 
Germany and for Europe. But meanwhile we 
must hold our countenances in patience. 

If we inquire the cause of the degeneracy 
we have been considering in the German 
character since the war of 1870 and the 
creation of the new empire — apart from those 
economic causes of change common to all 
countries in modern civilization — the answer of 
those who have followed the history of the 
period can hardly fail to be — Bismarck and 
Prussia. We have already seen in the short 
historical sketch given in the last chapter how 
the robber hand of Prussia, in violation of 

18 



274 GERMAN CULTURE 

all national treaty rights, had gradually suc- 
ceeded in annexing wellnigh all the neighbour- 
ing German territories. But, notwithstanding 
this, the greater part of Germany still remained 
outside the Prussian monarchy. The policy 
of Bismarck was first of all to cripple the rival 
claimant for the hegemony of Central Europe, 
Austria. Her complete subjugation being un- 
feasible, she had to be shut up rigorously to 
her immediate dominions on the eastern side 
of Central Europe, in order to leave the path 
clear for Bismarck, by war or subterfuge, to 
absorb, under a system of nominally vassal 
States, the whole of the rest of Germany into 
the system of the Prussian monarchy. 

Now, as we know, from its very foundation 
the Hohenzollern-Prussian monarchy has 
always been a more or less veiled despotism, 
based on working through a military and 
bureaucratic oligarchy. The army has been 
the dominant factor of the Prussian State from 
the beginning of the eighteenth century 
onwards. Prussia has been from the be- 
ginning of its monarchy the land of the drill- 
sergeant and the barracks. It is this system 
which the Junker Bismarck has riveted on the 
whole German people, with what results we now 
see. Badenese, Wiirtembergers, Franconians, 
Hanoverians, the citizens of the former free 
cities no less than the already absorbed West- 



MODERN GERMAN CULTURE 275 

phalians, Thuringians, Silesians, Mecklen- 
burgers, were speedily all reduced to being the 
slaves of the Prussian military system and of 
the Prussian military caste. The naive German 
peoples, as already pointed out, accepted this 
Prussian domination as the realization of their 
time-honoured patriotic ideal of German unity. 
The fact of their subservience was empha- 
sized in every way. The law of lese-majeste 
{majestdtsbeteidigang), by which all criticism 
of the despotic head of the State or his 
actions is made a heinous criminal offence, 
to which severe penalties are attached, it 
is not too much to say is a law which brands 
the ruler who accepts it as a coward and a 
cur, and the Legislature which passes it as a 
house, not of representative citizens, or even 
subjects for that matter, but of representative 
slaves. It must not be forgotten that the law 
in question strikes not only at public expres- 
sions of opinion in the press or on the platform, 
but at the most private criticism made in the 
presence of a friend in one's own room. The 
depths of undignified and craven meanness to 
which a monarch is reduced by being thus 
protected from criticism by the police -truncheon 
and the gaoler struck me especially as illus- 
trated by the following incident which hap- 
pened some years ago : Shortly after the ac- 
cession of the present Kaiser, a conjurer was 



276 GERMAN CULTURE 

giving his entertainment in a Swiss town. For 
one of the tricks he was going to exhibit he 
had occasion to ask the audience to send 
him up the names of a few public men 
on folded pieces of paper. His reception 
of the names written down was accom- 
panied by the " patter " proper to his 
profession. On coming to the name of 
Kaiser Wilhelm II he ventured the remark, 
*' Ah ! rd rather it had been the poor man 
just dead " (meaning the Emperor Frederick), 
** for I'm afraid this one's not much good." 
Will it be believed that the whole diplomatic 
machinery was set on foot to induce the Swiss 
Government to prosecute the unfortunate 
entertainer, abortively of course, since it 
could not have been legally done? Surely the 
head of a State who could allow his Govern- 
ment to descend to such contemptible petti- 
ness must be devoid of all sense of common 
self-respect, not to say personal dignity. And 
this is the fellow who claims to be hardly 
second in importance to his " dear old God '* ! 
In this connection it is only fair to recall the 
very different behaviour of King Edward VII 
when an Irish paper published not a mere 
criticism but an unquestionably libellous 
article reflecting on his private character. The 
police seized the copies of the paper and were 
prepared to take steps to prosecute, when the 



MODERN GERMAN CULTURE 277 

late King interfered and stopped even the con- 
fiscation of the paper. The least monarchical 
of us must, I think, admit that here we have a 
good illustration of the distinction between a 
man sure of his reputation and a cur nervously 
alarmed for his. 

This severe law of lese-majeste in Bismarck's 
Prusso-German Empire is only an illustration 
of the way in which the German people have 
been made to grovel before the Prussian 
jack-boot. The Prussification of Germany in 
matters military and in matters bureaucratic 
has gone on apace since 1870. Prussia, it 
is not too much to say, has hitherto consisted 
in a nation of slaves and tyrants and nothing 
else. It is the Prussian governing class which 
has everywhere and in all departments " set 
the pace *' since the empire was established. 
No man known to hold opinions divergent from 
those agreeable to the interests of the Prussian 
governing class can hope for employment, 
be it the most humble, in any department 
of the public service. This is particularly 
noticeable in its effects in the matter of 
education. The inculcation of the brutal 
and blatant jingoism of Von Treitschke 
at the universities by professors eager for 
approval in high places has already been 
sufficiently animadverted upon in more 
than one work on modern Germany. The 



278 GERMAN CULTURE 

defeat of Prusso -German militarism will be an 
even greater gain to all that is best in Germany 
herself than it will be to Europe as a whole. 

Delenda est Prussia^ understanding thereby 
not, of course, the inhabitants of Prussian terri- 
tory as such, but Prussia as a State-system 
and as an independent Power in Europe, must 
be the watchword in the present crisis of every 
well-wisher of Humanity, Germany included. 
A united Germany, if that be insisted upon, 
by all means let there be — a federation of all 
the German peoples with its capital, for that 
matter, as of old, at Frankfurt-on-the-Main, 
but with no dominant State and, if possible, 
excluding Prussia altogether, but certainly as 
constituted at present. Who knows but that a 
united States of Germany may then prove the 
first step towards a united States of Europe? 

But it is not alone to the political recon- 
struction of Germany or of Europe that those 
who take an optimistic view of the issue of 
the present European war look hopefully. The 
whole economic system of modern capitalism 
will have received a shock from which the 
beginnings of vast changes may date. Apart 
from this, however, the avowed aim of the 
war, the destruction of Prussian militarism and, 
indirectly, the weakening of military power 
throughout the world, should have immediate 
and important consequences. The brutalities 



MODERN GERMAN CULTURE 279 

and crimes committed in Belgium and the 
North of France at the instigation of the 
mihtary heads of this Prusso -German army do 
but indicate exaggerations of the military spirit 
and attitude generally. Von Hindenburg is 
not the first who has given utterance to the 
devilish excuse for military crime and brutality 
that it is " more humane in the end, since it 
shortens war." To. refute this transparent 
fallacy is scarcely necessary, since every his- 
torical student knows that military excesses 
and inhumanity do not shorten but prolong 
war by raising indignation and inflaming 
passions. The longest connected war known 
to history— -the Thirty Years' War — is generally 
acknowledged to have been signalized by the 
greatest and most continuous inhumanity of any 
on record. But whether military crime has the 
effect claimed for it or not, we may fain hope 
that public opinion in Europe will insist upon 
giving the *' humane " commanders who 
'' mercifully " endeavour to '' shorten " war by 
drastic methods of this sort a severe lesson. 
A few such treated to the utmost penalties the 
ordinary criminal law prescribes to the crimes 
of arson, murder, and robbery would teach 
them and their like that war, if waged at all 
nowadays, must be waged decently and not 
*' shortened " by such devices as those in 
question. 



28o GERMAN CULTURE 

If the present war with all its horrible 
carnage issues, even if only in the beginning 
of those changes which some of us believe 
must necessarily result from it — changes econo- 
mical, political, and moral—then indeed it will 
not have been waged in vain. With the great 
intellectual powers of the Germanic people 
devoted, not to the organization of military 
power and of national domination, but to 
furthering the realization of a higher human 
society ; with the determination on the part 
of the best elements among every European 
people to work together internationally with 
each other, and not least with the new Germany, 
to this end, and the great European war of 
1 91 4 will be looked back upon by future 
generations as the greatest world-historic 
example of the proverbial evil out of which 
good, and a lasting and inestimable good, has 
come for Europe and the world. 



If 3A02 



UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON 
















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